Laser Design Basics 🤔

Yeah, different strokes. :smile:

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A dashed stroke is one of many styles that can be applied to a path. The GF doesn’t interpret stroke styles, it just follows paths. Developing additional capabilities to interpret styles would cost $$ - which is part of the reason why commercial products like Epilog cost significantly more.

GF is the Cricut/Silhouette of the laser world.

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If you want to see what the Glowforge will “see”, go into outline mode ; control or command - y.

The reason they need different methods is because of how they interpret vector elements.

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Thanks for sharing!

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Thank you so much. This helped me sort out the difference between cuts, scores and engraves.

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Great! I’m glad it helped! :grinning:

There are a couple of other tutorials here that will get you up and running very quickly:

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Welcome to the Glowforge Community @LuckyV!

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I’m new here and I have just gotten my Glowforge. Ran two different things last night. One engrave and one score and this information would have been super helpful last night, but going forward, this is going to be a huge help! Thank you so much for putting this together!

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Glad it helped! :slightly_smiling_face:

Thank you! It is unreasonable and perhaps indicative of a degree of insanity the way I feel about R2D2, I mean, my Glowforge. I am so happy to be part of this community.

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most helpful post for me so far. Thank you!

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Thank you, this is a good resource.

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Thank you for this great writeup. Found it super useful!

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Welcome to the forum. As you have already discovered, there is lots of information available here as well as helpful people.

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This is a great post, I purchased and received my GF and have been so intimidated by it that I keep making excuses not to use it. I finally am pulling off the bandaid and searched high and low through the Community and found your thread. This is FANTASTIC, thank you for laying it out in terms I can understand and follow. Thank you for adding the pix to give me a connection of what I can expect and look for! Wish me luck, I’m ready to do this!

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We all wish each other luck. I hope you will be making lots of things and having fun now that you are jump in. When you have questions/problems, there are people here to help.

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I just stumbled on this when looking for something else. What a great resource! I’ve had my Glowforge 3 years and started working with an Epilog laser cutter almost 5 years ago. I wish someone had handed me this document then! It would have saved me a bunch of frustration as I just randomly clicked on things in Inkscape and hoped it would fix my issue! Thank you for the work you put into it.

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Great resource. A perfect place to start my design journey

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Amazing info! Wish I had seen this earlier! You have gone way out of your way to describe the basics and I am bookmarking for future reference! Thank you for such a wonderful contribution of your time and expertise @Jules

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As I am reading your pdf file I noticed on page 8 Raster files, you mentions tracing your raster images (recommended 300 dpi) to add cuts or scores around and/or within the image using the trace function within GFUI. I have only been able to do this by scanning a phycial copy of an image and not by uploading it. Is there a trick to it? I am using an image I created using my ipad and procreate with the background already removed.