Haven’t had the need to mess around with high engraving speeds till recently and just noticed that my pro doesn’t allow for engraves over 1000 speed. Looking through the announcements it seems that the faster speed should have been rolled out for all machines by now. Not sure why mine is stuck in the past.
It only applies to raster/bitmap images.
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Faster engrave speeds are only for raster (bitmap) engraves. Vector engraves max out at 1000.
And…faster speeds reduce usable bed size.
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Is there an easy way to turn a vector pdf into a raster for engraving purpose? Then I would need to realign the cutting line in a separate file in the glowfore UI?
In Inkscape, you just select “Make a Bitmap Copy”…
It creates a bitmap in exactly the same spot as the vector design you have selected. Just delete the vector version.
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There was a time when vector engraves would go very fast but there were bugs and it went away, As vector engraves are only cut to a single depth they dropped the speed on those, where a variable depth engrave needs the maximum LPI and maximum power to get the best resolution a single level does not have those issues.
Just so you know… Depending on how an engrave is set up it can actually take longer to print a project at faster speeds than slower ones. Has to do with the required distance to slow the head while moving from side to side. It’s complicated and I haven’t done extensive testing at higher speeds to develop best practices. Maybe others have suggestions or links.
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Yeah I have seen that in some of the smaller engraves I have. I have been experimenting with a meterial designed for a trotec laser and they suggest engraving much faster, which is why I wanted to give it a try. See if there was a change in quality of the engrave.
My only issue is then I would have to manually overlay the cut lines for edges of my design in the glowforge UI, which isn’t the most accurate
There will be no difference between doing it with a raster vs. a vector, so I’m not sure what the issue is there.
Can you cut on a raster line? I thought you could only cut vector lines
You keep the boundary when you edit the file to create the bitmap copy, or use the outline “premium” tool in the GF workspace.
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Speed on a Trotec and a Glowforge are totally different things as the units of 1000 on a Glowforge are not 1000 inches or feet or centimeters but some secret unit known only to the folks at Glowforge, And as noted speed is not speed that the job is done as the acceleration/deceleration makes the calculation ahead of the time pretty useless with higher speed as likely taking a longer time than slower speed. I do not bother with the time taken to do the job looking only to the quality of the result,
Hrmmmmm… you know… we COULD calculate that rather easily with some tests. 
One inch filled square… 240dpi… 1000 speed. 500 speed should be exactly half that…
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A fair amount of experimenting taught me that at a given LPI the time was about the same, but slowest at the extremes and some sweet spot in between very dependant on the size and shape of what you are engraving. So I engrave for the look and not worry about the time.
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I’m sorry for the confusion regarding the maximum engrave speeds. I’m glad to see that other community members were able to answer this question. Thanks folks!
Regarding the advice which @eflyguy shared about rasterizing vector objects. We have a guide on our support page which shows how to rasterize objects in either Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator. Here is a link to the guide: Rasterizing Objects
If you want to preserve some of your lines as cuts, you might be able leave them unselected when you rasterize the rest of your design. Will you please let us know if this info helps you get up and running with your project?
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Yeah definitely! I will do some testing this week and see what difference there is in the finished product!
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