I am having a hard time with the logo in this file. What do i need to do to be able to engrave it? I am going to reverse engrave the file when i can get it all figured out.
Was there a bitmap of the logo imported and placed into the SVG? Discourse strips them out when you post them. You’d have to zip the file up to include it.
A bitmap will default to an engrave without having to do anything to it when you load it into the GFUI.
I got the file as a PDF. he created it in AutoCad.
What’s wrong with the logo? The file has other issues, but the logo seems fine. For that style of logo I’d want it to be a single color, and probably a vector file, but it’ll engrave as is.
To invert it, it would be easiest if you had a vector file, but you could import it into your graphics editor of choice and make the background black and the text and images white.
this is what I get in the UI for engrave. To me, that looks like it will engrave a box around the logo?
Interesting, it appears the file has a bunch of manipulations on top of the original image to make it render the way it does. Here is the actual image when extracted…
An easy fix is the use Edit->Make bitmap copy in Inkscape. You may need to increase your dpi settings in bitmap preferences to get a good result.
Here it is using 300dpi
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The glowforge doesn’t engrave white, or think of it as engraving white at zero power (no laser, no marking.) If the background isn’t pure white, it may fire at a very low power, but if your material is masked it won’t get through the masking.
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True, though the engrave will take longer so it’s worth finding the fix 
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What fix? Besides opening it in a graphics editor and cutting out the white space above and below the text, the laser head has to travel back and forth over the same area. My understanding is that total time, for a given area, is a function of lpi and speed. I don’t do a lot of engraving so perhaps I’m missing something.
I just did some engraves where the background had some noise in it, but not enough to go through the masking. Maybe I should go clean it up and see if there is a difference in engrave times.
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In the case of your example - when the background isn’t pure white. There’s almost double the amount of space being traveled in the example they posted - half again above and below the actual text. So yes, engraving does travel the full distance, but if it’s traveling the distance of an invisible box around your art then it’s going to take noticeably longer
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thank you all for the help! I am able to work with what I have now.
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I’m trying to figure out how to reverse engrave
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Presuming what you mean by reverse engrave is that you want to engrave the white parts of a design and leave the black ones alone - that’s something you do in a raster program (PaintNet, Gimp, Photoshop, etc.) You’re looking for the “invert colours” command.
Take your original image (the one on the left), select it, and then (in PaintNet) to go Adjustments > Invert Colors - and it’ll turn into the one on the right
This is not something you need to do if you’re engraving a photo on the 
- it already takes care of that, but sometimes folks want to do it for art reasons 
(or in Inkscape: Filters/Color/Invert, and Invert lightness…)
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In some cases engraving reveals lighter material underneath, like engraving a black tile or a white core cardstock… in those cases, inverting is necessary.
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(… and on acrylic meant to be illuminated)
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… or glass or black stone.
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“art reasons”
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