Took the plunge bought a pro tonight! I have a cnc machine so I’m not new to working with machines however, I have some wood paper patterns and I’m wondering if I can some how scan them and make them work for cutting out in the glowforge? Can not wait till my machine gets here. I would like to start designing things now so I can have things ready to go in the machine when it gets here!
Thanks for any ideas/pointers you can give me
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Sure. Scan with whatever method you have at your disposal. Load into a design app of your choice. Trace the scanned image to convert to paths. Edit to ensure correct dimensions and clean up where necessary, then you can upload to the Glowforge interface for cutting.
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What have you used for designing for the CNC up to now? If you are looking for a new program Inkscape is the low-cost high value alternative.
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I don’t know what software you use for your cnc but I use Vectric Vcarve pro for mine as well as my Glowforge.
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You can scan anything you’d like but just scanning alone won’t be enough. You’ll need to upload the scanned image into a program that allows you to create vector art like Adobe Illustrator. It’s there that you will redesign your image into paths for cutting or scoring and fills for engraving. There’s plenty of info here about how to go about doing that, so dig in while you wait and have fun!
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Hi, and welcome to the forum. I hope your GF arrives soon, but not before you have a ton of designs to work with . Please post them so we can see your work.
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When you scan and trace in an outside program, it’s worth noting than the defaults in most design programs will give you filled shapes rather than single paths. This results in what looks like a double cut in the GFUI and tends to trip up new users. There’s lots of tips on this forum for the common programs to solve this 
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Of late I have also been using Gimp that is great for raster images but technically not a vector editor. However, by setting up masking areas you can not only clean up the raster part but you can save it as a path and export the path as an SVG that will come into Inkscape and be generally cleaner than Inkscape’s Trace command.
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