One svg but 2 images in GF?

Good Morning all. I have an .svg file that is a scan of my Grammie’s recipe. I used Illustrator to clean up the scan and saved it as an svg file. When I upload it into GF there are 2 images, one that has the loops in the letters filled in and a random border line and then another that is what I actually want to engrave. I’ve used it and made what I wanted to and that’s all great but I would like to know what I did wrong so that as I make more of these types of scanned to engrave files I don’t end up with 2 images.
Molasses Cookies HiRes ingre
I tried looking around in the Community but I don’t know what to call what’s happening so I am not getting anything useful.

Thanks :slight_smile: and Happy Mothers Day :sunflower:

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Hey there!
so when I open the file in Inkscape, and ungroup it, I can see all of those filled in areas that appear in the GFUI (your second image, the filled in loops) as separate objects.
somehow your software made those areas into other objects.

I don’t use illustrator so I can’t offer any suggestions for how not to have that happen in that software. I’m sure someone else will be able to though :slight_smile:

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You should be able to just make the file a raster and engrave it.

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This can take a bit of time depending on what all is there. You can open the layers panel then click on all the > to expand the you can shut some layers off and see if that corrects it. you may also want to go into outline mode. under the view menu. hope this helps a bit. I am not sure what causes it to duplicate different parts.

I’m going to guess that when you did the Auto-Trace on the image, you did not have the “Ignore White” box checked. It creates a separate white filled grouping, that either has to be deleted or set to Ignore.

Fastest way to fix it is to use Ignore White when you do the Auto-Trace. Or you can rasterize it and turn it into an Engrave by selecting everything and choosing Object> Rasterize.

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I tried using the GF trace but the original is actually just a photocopy of some old piece of paper that is yellowed so I ended up using my scanner, saved as a jpg then opened it in Illustrator to clean up the image… you could see handwriting from whatever was on the back of the page and some other schmutz. I did that with Image Trace because I read someone somewhere said that was the thing to do… and I’m a bit clueless… obviously :grimacing:

I don’t seem to have multiple layers when I look at it in Illustrator which is why I’m confused that 2 images show up in GF. I mean in the end it works if I ignore one layer so I guess it’s not a huge deal.

Hmmmm…I might be a little bit confused about what caused it. Did you click on the Trace results? That creates a cut line, (or two, if you clicked directly on the black ink part of the scan) and that’s not what you want for this…it’s just going to be engraved.

If you have a scan of the recipe, you would probably want to take it into Photoshop to clean up the scan (you want a 100% white background and it’s easier to do that in a raster style software like Photoshop), then just drag and drop the JPG or PNG onto the Dashboard. It will open up in a new file, and you can use it for Engraving on anything. You can use the Shapes tools in the Glowforge interface to add a cut line around it if you want.

You did get it to work that way though, so it might be what you want. (It just takes a little longer.)

There are a few short tutorials on getting started in Design that might help you to decide which steps will work best for you depending on the kind of file you start with.

Of course we start with the first 3:

And there are methods for Enhancing your Photo Engraves and Cutting Out a Shape as well.

These are some good Design tutorials to start with:
(Once you understand these, it gets really easy.)

Have fun! :slightly_smiling_face:

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