Issue with GF and Illustrator file

[sohospgapeach]

So I recently made the switch from creating my files in Inkscape, and am now using the latest Illustrator CC. It’s definitely been a learning curve with even just the basics. Some of the tiny issues I’ve had to research and work around in Illustrator were things like: Resizing issues when opening in GF, GF erroring when trying to upload, text not displaying, etc. I’ve overcome a lot of that, but I just hit something very new.

I’m making a bunch of key chains, so I duplicated the single key chain into a grid of 5x6 in Illustrator. This key chain has an outline to cut, a graphic, and three lines of text. It’s all grouped together in Illustrator. I export as an SVG but when I import into glowforge there is an issue:

GF is seeing the graphic as 30 different graphics, instead of 1, meaning I have to change to my special settings 30 different times (but the text is seen all as one and same with the cut rectangles). I didn’t have this issue at ALL with Inkscape and duplicating objects, and I question moving to illustrator for this work that typically took about 10 minutes to prep to now spending hours re-doing. Any suggestions?! Thank you for your input!

[Ratel]

Yes, individual raster images are always treated individually. What you can do in Illustrator is lock all the cut lines and score lines, group them, then hide them. Select all of the raster images and convert them into one large raster image. (Select>Object>Rasterize>PNG at a high dpi.)

Then display and unlock the cut and score lines. It creates one large raster image.

One word of caution…don’t try to do a full bed image with multiples…reduce it by one column at the sides so you don’t wind up having to redo your master raster…the amount of space available to engrave is smaller than the amount available for cutting. Keep the total width of the raster image at 18 inches in Illustrator.

[sohospgapeach]

Ah I see - thank you for these detailed steps. I will try it and see how it behaves for me