I thought you could tell it what to do for each colour. So only the bits selected for engraving need to be rasterised. Any that are should be rasterised with normal SVG rendering rules instead of a confusing new set of rules that are rarely what is expected or wanted.
That’s a valid opinion that we considered, but creates a different set of problems, so we decided to go a different way.
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I’m really struggling with getting the hang of this workflow.
I absolutely thought I was going to be able to take a Black and White SVG created in Inkscape and be able to engrave it in one pass. Instead, when I open it up, I get a bunch of separate processes. This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if they could be combined into a single engrave process.
Instead of designing artwork that looks the way I want it- Lets just say I want a circle with a heavy line around it. Simple enough-Just change the line weight like I’ve been doing for years. Wrong!
Also I’m very disappointed with the speed of the engraves. Getting decent engraves really needs the LPI pretty high, or the engrave looks like Morse Code after the titanic hit the iceburg. The head moves so slow, it makes me think larger engraves are impractical.
So far I really have not achieved any better output than I’m getting out of my K40- other than it does cut really well.
I know it’s me and not the 'Forge. I just expected it to outclass my other machine with simplicity, and speed. It hasn’t yet.
Ironically the people who find designing for their Glowforge most frustrating are those that have lots of experience designing with vector tools previously. As you say, thicker line just means increasing the line weight! If you want to make a donut shape, just put a white hole on top of a black hole.
The biggest trick to learn is the boolean operators. Compound shapes of one color engrave together, so expanding lines & joining shapes is usually the path to success.
If you have any specific questions, please do start a thread, ideally with a sample file.
Good luck!
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It looks like copying from inkscape and pasting into the GFUI may do what I need for now.
When I tried it earlier, I feared a loss of resolution since it converts the copy to a bitmap. I need to run some tests to see if/what info is lost in the copy/paste method.
Time for more Pie.
Yes - you can also rasterize it (in inkscape or via the method you describe) to make it all engrave at once. You can indeed get a loss of resolution, though.