Newbie questions about using iPhone to operate Glowforge

Hi, I just received my Glowforge a couple days ago. I’m trying to do the gift tag that it tells you to create on the manual. It tells you to use Inkscape, but I’m just using my iPhone and all I have found that is similar to Inkscape is Vectornator. I created a gift tag, but I cannot upload to the Glowforge. I’m not very tech savvy so this has been very hard for me to figure out. I tried to just use a screen shot of the gift tag I created and after I uploaded it, I couldn’t see the layers of it to where I can set the settings for scoring and cutting. I’m feeling completely defeated. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

You are going to need a graphics program like Inkscape, Affinity Design of Adobe Illustrator to create files that are complex. Using just an iPhone, you should be able to create something just in the interface. Open the app. Click “Create” choose new design. Click the circle tool and create the three circles it describes in the tutorial. Click the text tool. Choose a font and type what you want on the circular gift tag. You will probably want the text engraved. When you have the text and circles arranged the way you want, you should be able to choose the cut/score/engrave operations separately on the left side. Click print, push the button when it flashes and you should have created something.

Did you print the Gift of Good Measure already?

I am sorry you are feeling defeated - soon you will be creating and having fun. There are lots of helpful people here in the forum that will help you through this initial period of feeling overwhelmed.

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There are a couple of owners here that use a tablet to design and print, one of them should be along to provide some guidance.

I’ve moved this to an appropriate forum - Problems and Support is for opening tickets with Glowforge support staff.

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Thank you so much, this was very helpful, I will try this! I was going to try and just get by with my tablet and phone, but I guess I’ll be investing into a laptop now lol.

Oh and yes, I did the gift of good measure first. It worked, although it came out backwards :thinking:

You are going to have a bit of difficulty designing things on something as small as an iPhone, but it is doable.

First of all, when you save your document, make sure you save it as a pdf. Vectornator svg files (at least the last I tried it) come in to the Glowforge interface the wrong size, but PDFs come out okay. Then save it to the Files area of your iPhone. When you login to Glowforge and click on Create From File, then Browse, then locate the file where you saved it on your iPhone and click on it. It will upload to the Glowforge with all the lines you created as vectors that can be set to Cut.

I’m not a frequent Vectornator user, and I’ve only used it on iPad not iPhone, but if I can help further I’ll be glad to.

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Several users just have an ipad and do pretty well with Affinity Design. I don’t know about other tablets. Anyway, I would find the iphone limiting just because I need to see more of the Glowforge bed than I can see on my ancient iphone.

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