What’s the longest you’ve waited for a file to prepare? I’m trying to figure out if there’s an issue or not. I have taken just the wheat tiles from Glowforge’s PDF. I used Illustrator to just take the wheat set and resaved as a PDF. It loaded into the App fine but twice now I’ve tried to prepare, the file waited 15mins and given up.
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I think everything that I have loaded into the app successfully has prepared with about the same amount of time 5-6 minutes tops usually. Though I have been having problems with designs just hanging when opening and never showing in the app at all. I am learning to despise the “Rendering your design…” message.
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Yes I found the same thing with rendering. I’ve found that a really frustrating part of the design process. I usually end up saving in a different format or going back to the design trying to figure out what is causing the issue.
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So third time… 9 minutes to prepare. No idea if rebooting both the Glowforge and the App made the difference.
Side note if you are interested in the Catan set and haven’t tried it yet. It looks like each set of tiles will take around an hour twenty to complete.
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I have been waiting for two years.
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Welp… I’ve been waiting for about 15 minutes for one of my designs…It’s a bunch of simple cuts, with one exception, there’s a lot of text (that I’ve converted to a path) that I want to engrave. I’ve closed the app and reopened it, to go back in and it’s still sitting there “rendering”. Kind of interesting because the preview of it in the catalog file management section (home). Shows it all right. I’m starting to wonder if I should convert the text into a .jpg and add it in seperate.
Not sure if it still applies, because I haven’t run any text lately, but it had to be either converted to shapes first, or turned into a jpeg in order for the interface to recognize it.
If you convert it to paths or shapes, that can become a LOT of shapes for the interface to interpret, depending on how much text there is. So rendering can take a long time.
Converting to a jpeg might be quicker. 
(Haven’t tried it though so not certain sure.)
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Sometimes (often?) if you’re looking to engrave text that’s appropriately sized (e.g. not radically scaled up) it can be quicker to convert to a bitmap (I do PNGs) vs using filled vector shapes. In fact I’m doing a job now that takes three 2 1/2 hour runs to fill a sheet of material. Either a full sheet or vectors (of a full sheet) won’t render - it’ll give me the “something happened” error message after about a half hour. They’re 1.5" coins and anything over 21 or so on the board won’t render. The render on the 21 takes 12-13 minutes. (I might be able to go another 7ish and still squeak into the approximately 3hr buffer capacity but then the render also increases in time. It’s already pushing my patience.)
So you can let it render a bit more (although 15 minutes is a long time) or cut to the chase and do the convert to bitmap approach. Also, you could reduce the LPI on the engrave as that will reduce the time for both the render and the job and may make it work as it is. The default for PG materials is usually 340 and a 270 or even 225 is often okay (you can bump the power or drop the speed a bit if you want the depth that the 340LPI gives you).
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Yep… Just went and converted it and set it up, while letting my other browser window try and render the original one in the mean time. Converted one finished and is now printing…
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