Order of whats engraved or cut

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My apologies if this has already been asked. I couldn’t find it, but alas my googlefu has never been strong.

Just a quick question. I have noticed when either engraving or cutting something the GF does it in what appears to be a random order. No I am not referring to the side bar where you can choose to engrave everything first, then cut. I am referring to, for example, if you had to engrave a portion of numbers. It will start out in the upper left hand corner then go to the bottom right hand corner and then back upwards again. It almost appears random. Am I missing something that would make it go left to right? Or is that just the way it is right now?

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It’s ordered by color and then by operation, using the hex numbers of the colors. Black is 000000, so it will be first, white is FFFFFFFF, so it will be last. (If you’re silly enough to draw things in white!)

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Within a single colour there also seems to be hidden system so no single part of the material is heated for too long - so a single design that’s been combined so it’s all one “line” will still pop around. Someone on here did an experiment to try to figure out how much time was being lost, and it was shockingly minimal :slight_smile:

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I have found that it is more based on the composition of the file. If I draw a square, and then fillet the corners in a discrete operation, it some times cuts all the straight line first and then the fillets after instead of just going around. I do all my output now from SolidWorks through PDF. That might play a role?

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I’ve wondered about this as well. I’ve watched it cut an inner circle located inside and to the right of a bigger piece for example, then move all the way to the left of the piece to begin cutting it out. It would be a quicker solution to just move to the nearest border and begin the cut.

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yes, not logical when you watch it. At the end of the day it seems to make little difference in time or quality though.

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No difference in quality at all but certainly not the quickest way to do things.

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I would like 9 perpendicular white lines, some drawn with transparent ink.

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Thanks guys! If itss minimal time I won’t “worry” about it anymore. Just a curiosity to my slightly OCD mind :wink:

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I have to admit it bugs me also. If I cared enough I would see if I could force a certain order by carefully planning my workflow in composing the file. If I cared enough or was bored…

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Part of the “processing” you see after you hit print is to determine “optimal” path for the head.

Print the same (relatively complex) design twice, and it will take completely different paths.

So it’s automagical, no way to control it, and doesn’t make enough difference to worry about.

If, however, you have areas of a design that would likely be better printed before others, i.e. cutting small pieces out of larger parts or engraving an area before cutting, then you can assign a different color and run those first, That’s covered above…

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Great work community! I don’t have anything to add on this one and it seems like the conversation’s quieted so I’m going to close it out.

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