Hi, so all day I’ve been trying to upload a file from Inkscape and using the pass through. Unfortunately although I was using different colours don’t know what happened it just wouldn’t work… secondly it will not align… the camera has a mind of its own sometimes it’s aligned sometimes it’s a few mm off. While using the pass through for a large item how would you make a jig or align… confused?
There are now a couple of ways under development…the most recent addition is still in Beta…it’s called Snapmarks, and they are the precursor to the alignment software that the Glowforge team is currently developing. (They allow for perfect alignment…very nice, but they are not available to everyone yet, they are being rolled out to various machines for testing right now.)
So if you do not have the little magnet icon for Snapmarks displayed on your app yet, you can still use the jig method to use the Passthrough with good alignment. We have a couple of tutorials that lay out the method here:
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Thank you very much… I looked into this but so far haven’t understood it.
Making a jig for everything is quite a long job unless that’s just me, not sure. And I don’t really know how it would be don’t for large objects going in the pass through. Thank you anyway
What we’re doing in those tutorials might look kind of complex, but it’s actually a fairly easy process.
Step one is to split the design into sections less than ten inches tall. You’ll want to do that because you want to work with shorter segments. (it’s a time saver for engraving and if there is any misalignment, the effect is magnified on longer stretches.)
Step two is to add some indexing marks out to the side. That creates a bridge between the design parts and the printed results.
Step three is to use your eyes in the bed of the machine, not the image on the screen, to match up the indexing marks as you print them, and when you shift the material up. If you keep the material perfectly level against the side of the tray, and do not let the jig shift, that creates a three-point matching system that does a pretty good job of aligning things.
We actually do something fairly similar with the Snapmarks, so understanding that might help…there’s another writeup at the end of these notes on using the Snapmarks for Passthrough alignment: (Those come out perfect. But we still have to split the file before printing it.) 
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Thank you for your reply. I will try this, hopefully won’t be too difficult.
I’m sorry you’re running into trouble. Thanks for the tips regarding pass through and alignment, @Jules.
I’ll need some more details in order to look into the problem you’re having with the file you created in Inkscape. If possible, could you please share the file? If you’d rather not post it here, you can email it to us at support@glowforge.com. Additionally, please let me know what sort of trouble you’re having with the file.
Thank you in advance.
Hi, I’ve lost what I was doing if I have the same problem again il get back to you. Thanks for your help👍.
Thank you for letting us know @designersdeck
I’m going to close this thread - if the problem reoccurs, go ahead and post a new topic. Thanks again for letting us know about this!