Notes on Working with Snapmarks™ 🤔

True…thanks for the reminder. I was thinking of engraving the Snapmarks, not ink printing them.

That said, I’ve been fine printing the Snapmarks in their default presentation from GF.

Presumably why dan mentioned open customer service positions at Glowforge in the October update.

@Jules, I don’t know if you might want to update the original post, but we just discovered that Inkscape 0.92 needs the snapmarks set to a different size.

At a Scale of 96, the snapmarks need to be .343 x .417 in order to work.

1 Like

I’ll take care of it. Thanks for letting me know. :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like

If you go to, I believe, Preferences > Tools, there should be an option for set Bounding Box to Use - either Geometric Bounding Box or Visual Bounding Box. What is selected here for you?

If it’s Visual Bounding Box (default, I believe) it will display the object size including the stroke. If you select Geometric Bounding Box, it will actually use the path for the size, not the stroke.

You’ll find that your tabs etc will probably fit better also :wink:

4 Likes

That was set to Visual Bounding Box. I’ll set it to Geometric and test the snapmarks again tomorrow.

Attention to @Jules and @jbmanning5 and @bonny

@jbmanning5 was spot on. When @bonny and I were troubleshooting, I had Inkscape on Visual Bounding Box and found that the size for the snapmarks needed to be the .343 x .417 when the stroke was at .01 inches thick.

When I changed the preferences to Geometric Bounding Box, the size of the .343 x .417 went down to .332 x .405 which is what we need it to be.

@jbmanning, when I was doing tabbed work I always ended up changing the View to Outline and matched up my tabs from there. Always got a better fit than trying to match up the strokes… now I know why. Thank you SO much for that little tidbit.

4 Likes

Well, let’s see how easy it is to reverse the edit history, cause I removed it completely thinking that they had made modifications to the Snapmarks size. :neutral_face:

1 Like

Got the snaps to work after upsizing them 1.333x in Illustrator. When exported as an SVG they are correctly sized and the alignment worked perfectly.

“Design Needs Snapmarks”. I cannot get the snapmarks to work, any ideas would be appreciated.

  • The attached example was not resized
  • Snapmarks are sized to 0.332 and 0.405 respectively.
  • Tried wide spacing the snaps using just two and then four. Same result.
  • Power cycled unit.
  • Used exactly the same SVG upload to make the jig and then tried to snap the engraving.

The original file is created in Illustrator and then exported for screens as an SVG. One possible problem that I’m wondering about - the cutline is 4 inches, but shows as exactly 3" on GFUI. So the snapmarks may be resizing as well to 75% of the Illustrator size. Could that be the issue?

Did you leave the Responsive box unchecked when you saved your SVG file?

It sounds like you are exporting 72 dpi on your Illustrator Snapmarks. (72 dpi is the default import dpi for Illustrator.) What happens when you have Responsive checked in your SVG settings, is that you are forcing the GFUI to use a different value for sizing than what it expects.

The GFUI interprets what it sees in SVG files as 96 dpi. The ratio between the two, 96dpi / 72 dpi = 1.3333. So what you are doing is artificially inflating the size of the snapmarks using a ratio to account for the different dpi interpretation values between Illustrator and the GFUI.

Long (and confusing) story short…if you just uncheck that Responsive box when you save your SVG, you shouldn’t need to resize your Snapmarks. :slightly_smiling_face:

7 Likes

Thanks, Jules. That is very helpful and I will review.

1 Like

Just cut several pieces out of ¼" maple that were 26" long and your instructions for breaking up the files worked perfectly. Thank you!

2 Likes

about 12 days ago…

In Inkscape

No, I saw that, but they need to be the sizes listed above in the first post. Those numbers are a Visual Bounding issue.

1 Like

I changed mine to those measurements and it snapped much better. I’ll check them again later and let you know ans post some pics…

Well, one of the things that makes beta testing so damned difficult is the constant changes…they might have rolled some out, and it’s possible that they don’t need to see the exact sized marks any more.

Guess I need to go run a few tests again…maybe change the writeup.

Hmmmm…okay I did just run a few tests…the marks do allow for a slight variation in size, but you can’t blow them out and make them 20% bigger. So while it might not need to be as exact as it was the first time around, they still need to be fairly closely sized. (They can be off by a few pixels though.)

2 Likes

Oh wow! Great work. I can’t wait until I get my snapmarks! I do a lot of repetitive engraving and really need these to stop making small templates!

all the SVG/DPI/Inkscape issues just make me happy to be using Illustrator.