So what is wrong here that gives a “No Artwork” message by the Print Button?
Any ideas?
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There are boundaries for etching and scoring/cutting. You’ll see them when you select the objects and try to move them. Looks like grayed diagonal lines. Anything that touches those boarders is not recognised.
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Still leaves a number of pieces that should be recognizing.
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Thanks. Did the right arrow once and it moved it from the “no man zone”.
Everything gave the red look and now is wanting to print.
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Except they are a single group. Groups are single objects.
I edited because when you copy paste in the glowforge interface. The settings for etch/cut/etc don’t duplicate. In other words, you can not select different setting for each iteration. His screen shot shows each copy, which means they are copies in the svg file.
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Ah, learn something new.
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One thing. If you ignore an object that is in the ‘no go’ zones, it will allow you to print the job. This is good if you have jigs set up and you add ‘cross hairs’ (That extend past the print boundary) to every svg file. You align the cross hairs for your jig, then ignore them and ‘print’.
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Seems like the error message is wrong. There is plenty of artwork. The issue is some of it is outside the boundary, so it should be “Artwork out of bounds” or something.
Why does each token get its own settings? They all look to be the same colour.
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I would also think it easier to just Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V…
In the GFUI the artwork will always appear the same color. If he has multiple instances in the left column that means they are each a different color in the SVG.
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So that makes the error message even more wrong as many of the tokens are within the bounds, so there is plenty of artwork that can be engraved, just a few bits that can’t.
You can put the tokens that have been set to Ignore out of bounds, but otherwise they must be in bounds.
Also, the No Artwork message comes up if no settings have been chosen (in non Proofgrade)
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If you group objects in your svg, even when different colors, does the Glowforge consider it a single object for bounding purposes?
Did a test and nope. 4 instances of a circle, different colors, set as a single group. Came up with 4 different etch options. But when I moved it so it was over the boundary, it only flagged the one circle. Hmm.
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There are two types of engraving. One where you use a solid fill color with settings for speed, power and lpi and a “picture (my word)” engrave with settings for speed, power, lpi, method for mapping colors to power and min and max power settings. I haven’t done the picture style in quite a while, but iirc each image gets its own operation in the GFUI. I mainly engrave for depth with a solid fill color and then each color gets its own operation just like with a cut operation.
As regards colors, when the GFUI displays your file in the preview, as seen in the OP, if does not reproduce the colors from the original file. When you select an operation from the list on the left-hand-side it highlights what you have selected in pink.
IIRC, I’m not near my glowforge to double-check, if you add the same file multiple times using the Add Artwork button it treats each one separately even when the colors from the original files are the same.
And the error messages could use some improvement.
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Vectors.
Bitmaps.
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Quite the understatement. And it applies to just about every error condition you can encounter; Glowforge is really bad at providing useful error messages.
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As all of our software projects go from generic to more specific error and informational messages over time I’m not casting stones.
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I always put detailed error handling and logging in at the start of my projects. It makes debugging so much easier. I can’t see the sense of doing the other way round. It doesn’t save any time, quite the opposite.
How on earth does an app like this get rolled out in public with no sensible error messages? When I wrote software professionally that was going into a mass produced product it would get thrashed by testers, designers, the product manager and probably the MD of the company. Any one of those people would have thrown it back it me if it came up with a confusing error message because if you send out 10,000 you are only going to be swamped with support calls.
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Not exactly. I just did that this weekend. If it’s a replicated bitmap in the SVG it’s going to show up multiple times. If it’s a replicated vector in the SVG it shows up once.
My pencils & coins demonstrate the behavior very consistently. If you’re doing something like the OP I find it easier to replicate the individual coins in the GFUI. (One in the SVG that you cut & paste multiple times in the GFUI. Pick one, copy/paste, pick the two & copy paste, pick the 4 and copy paste, pick the 8 and copy/paste - way quicker than dealing with all the individual engrave operations.)
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I did not realize that! Learn something new every day. Is that only for bitmaps? doesn’t seem to work for vector only.