It makes me squirm a lot! 
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“It is known.”
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The intent has always been for large files to process and if they are too big to fit in the buffer to cut and then the rest of the file is downloaded. Don’t know if that will be a continuous stream or if the unit would have to pause and load the rest of the design. But clearly that is not yet working. No reason to believe it won’t.
Lining up things precisely will require the head camera, not the lid camera. Again not yet implemented.
And not talking about you here… Some say this should all be easy. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I give those people the same amount of respect I give the group of retired old men in McDonald’s who think they understand geopolitics.
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What? Don’t you think everybody would expect a laser to be able to engrave a full bed of objects? I don’t think any other CNC machine has limits on job size smaller than its bed. I don’t know how GF could think a 3 hour limit would be enough. They must have known even moderate sized engraves would exceed that.
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Just like @Jules, thanks for responding to the topic. I think that saying “The software is in beta” is a little too dismissive and flippant. It is a comment that does not help push the discussion forward.
Design is hard enough, and having errors that are not explained, makes it even harder. In my complaint I am trying to differentiate between “It sucks that this error occurred” and “an error occurred and I have no idea why”. The first sentence can be explained by the software still being under development. The second is harder for me to understand. We are all guessing that the reason my file had issues was the size of the file. I exported the svg to pdf and loaded that. It worked fine. So maybe the file size is less of an issue. I can’t learn from the mistake and create a better file in the future if the software does not give feedback on the issue.
Thank you again for trying to help.
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Agreed.
Sorry, didn’t mean to offend.
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This is interesting…I don’t know that anyone has tried that.
Might be a way to deal with them if we just suggest it up front.
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Wasn’t disagreeing. Just letting you know that two of the things you had a problem with are something that is expected to be operational at some point. Didn’t want to leave it with the impression that this is all that you will get. Also have no doubt that there will be improved error messages. We are all waiting. I would rather have my unit now and receive upgrades than defer until I could get everything I paid for.
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Sorry…but some of us have not clue one. I have no idea whatsoever… what to expect of a laser. I’ve never seen one, operated one, nor owned one…until now.
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If it’s already in Illustrator, why wouldn’t you just rasterize it there or export as a 1-bit PNG?
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The one I looked at was corrupted. (Might have been the recent Discourse thing.)
Yes, the file in the original post of this thread has been mangled by Discourse stripping out its style sheet, which causes all of the paths in it to default to fill: black, stroke: none. It’s also apparent from the header that it has been saved “responsive”, so the size has been lost. But the OP presumably has the pre-mangled file and can do something like support suggests in this topic, although depending on the size they may get away with just a single bitmap engrave at a lower LPI.
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I tried to modify my files based on the information in this thread, but now I’m really confused.
I’m trying to work through my files to understand what works and what does not. Having the files as .ai does not help me because you can’t load them into the GFUI, and when I save them as SVG’s, the country boarder lines no longer line up. This lead me to saving as PDF’s which can be loaded into the GFUI.
So I made a new .ai file that has two layers, the country names and the country boarders. When I turn one layer off and save the file to PDF, the file loads (even though it is 3.1 mb, takes forever). Each layer individually loads in the GFUI. However, when I save the PDF file with both layers on, it will not load.
PDF with just country names (works)
WRLD-AF-02-0001-For-Glowforge-bigEdits_Just_Names.pdf (3.1 MB)
PDF with just county boarders (Works)
WRLD-AF-02-0001-For-Glowforge-bigEdits_Just_Lines.pdf (3.1 MB)
PDF with both layers turned on (does not work)
WRLD-AF-02-0001-For-Glowforge-bigEdits_Names_Land.pdf (3.1 MB)
Illustrator file (cannot be loaded into GFUI):
WRLD-AF-02-0001-For-Glowforge-bigEdits_Names_Land.ai (9.1 MB)
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Okay, got your AI file working just fine…but I had to do a few things to it:
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Removed the clipping mask
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Simplified the number of nodes from over 69000 to 3775
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Combined the double overlapping outlines of the states into one engravable image. (Pathfinder - unite)
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Converted the Text to fills, and removed the separate treatments of strokes on them. Expanded and combined the strokes with the fills. (Might have been used to thicken the fonts.)
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When the file opens up in the GFUI - used the Manual settings to change the engraves from 450 LPI to 270 LPI.
And it still takes several minutes to process, so give it some time.
39 minutes to print at that size. (But I left the option in it to treat the text as a separate engrave.)
(All of this reduces the 9.1 MB AI file size to 211 KB, which the interface has no trouble accepting.)
WRLD-AF-02-0001-For-Glowforge-bigEdits_Names_Land3.zip (211.2 KB)
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So kind of you to do all that work! 
You are a 
!
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No, no…it took longer to type up the steps than it did to do it. 
Once I got an uncorrupted AI file that I could work with, it took about 20 minutes to get three versions of that knocked out for testing. What took so long was the rendering time to test each one and see how it could be streamlined further.
It’s much harder to figure out how to tell folks what to look for, because a lot of that comes with several months of practice now with the PRU.
Eventually though, everyone will know what to look for. It’s really just a few things to remember.
And in case I haven’t plugged it yet in this thread…this writeup describes a few things I’ve run across, and can help people get started quickly:
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Thanks so much for the help, @Jules!
@dpmarkman, are you still having difficulty printing this file?
@vee I went on vacation and have not had a chance to confirm the file. But I am really happy with the Glowforge community.
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We’re really happy with the community too!
It’s been a little while since I’ve seen any replies on this thread so I’m going to close it. If you still need help with this please either start a new thread or email support@glowforge.com.