Pottstown, PA here...The eagle has landed

Hey, I was the master of document manipulation for paper lengths in college, including using kerning and leading to make things a little longer or shorter. Even my profs that wised up to font, size, and spacing (very few), couldn’t cope with all the tricks I could pull.

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Sorry to hear this. Many of my old designs that I was going to work with were created with a dedicated craft cutting machine. The Silhouette Cameo’s “Silhouette Studio”. It used to export to SVG, but that went away a long time ago. I hear that it will be back with a new update in a few months.

I’d like to avoid tracing as much as possible, it is always a bit fiddly. Your Guinness trace in Illustrator came out great, but I can’t justify the ongoing cost for my hobby use. I’m doing some work in Affinity Designer, but don’t think they have a good trace function yet. I’ve seen some online vector apps and may have to work with them for now. I’ve only had fair success with them. Any info on other ways to get graphics to a vector PDF would be appreciated.

Thanks,
I’ll PM you something in a few minutes.

The forum is always helpful.

There are several of the PRUs who are Silhouette gurus, I defer to them

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Thanks! Yes… I was saying that yesterday… I’m not going to practice on :proofgrade: or anything. And it’s not like I’m wasting… laser molecules or something. (Yes, yes… I know the tube has a life expectancy.) I got some good scrap from my co-worker this morning. And I’m talking good scrap. Like, some of which won’t be scrap because they’re pretty darn nice! So I’ll have lots of experimenting to do. I’ve got so much to learn. When my wife asked me to try a photo, I tried to talk her out of it because I just wasn’t prepared to do that yet. But I didn’t want to discourage her, so I did it. As soon as I said yes, I realized the problem I was about to face… I can etch the picture, but then how to do I tell it to cut it out afterwards?! So, at first I thought “Okay. I can make a box. Doesn’t even matter what size. I’ll just scale everything in the GFUI.” Wrong. I didn’t realize the GFUI always maintains aspect ratio. BOO! (Unless there’s a way to unlink x from y that I haven’t seen!) So I made my box the size of my image, plus 2 pixels all around. Worked perfectly. I did find the GFUI zoom to be painfully slow when I was trying to align my box around my picture, but otherwise the result made me smile. The picture came out like crap, but I learned my lesson… make sure the picture is ready to be lased. This one wasn’t at all and I knew that and told my wife it’d be crappy, and it was.

I’d seen videos/suggestions of light scrubbing with a little soap and water. So I gave that a try on this picture. More lessons learned… I wiped away most of what little detail there was on the picture. Also, the 1/8" maple hardwood immediately bowed… a lot. So no more of that game until I know what the hell I’m doing.

Anyway… I’m sure I’ll play more this weekend! I doubt I’ll produce anything immediately that warrants posting in Made On A Glowforge though. :slight_smile:

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Gorilla tape is your friend for weeding, and for curving that is a problem when you carve away a huge amount on one side (the fibers on the back push in with nothing to oppose them on the front)

As for the box, you can (if vector cutting/bitmap engraving) either do these separately or for sanity, combine them in one cut file (see the tutorial as below - I think there is an AI one as well)

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Thanks for that knowledge!

Thinking this through, I can’t see a benefit to combining. Might just be my workflow mentality. Am I missing something?

You are missing the ease of aligning. Visually aligning is painful, aligning in AI or Inkscape or whatever is programmatic (like hit the align center or offset buttons) which allow you to scale things sanely. Also scaling together in AI or Inkscape takes care of keeping proportions (or not as you see fit). Plus of course zooming in AI to 1600% is way, way more accurate than the GFUI…

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Yes. Yes I was. I was missing exactly that. That’s what I get for thinking rather than doing. If I was home right now that would have been obvious. :slight_smile:

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I only speak from having failed before… and then the other PRUs taught me a lot… When you come from the CAD world, doing artistic stuff is non-obvious (what do you mean I can’t do a relative parametric constraint?)

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I’ve found output from the Print dialog box to work where a lot of other export types have failed. I am using Inkscape, and you get what you pay for. I have had issues with exporting to SVG and PostScript of use with my final output, the absolutely horrid CorelLaser on a PC when outputting to my K40.
My current workflow is to Export toPDF from Inkscape, open in Preview, Print to PDF (And Transfer over the network to the PC) Then Import into Corel.

Occasionally I do have issues. Making sure to convert text to Paths when exporting from Inkscape is important (I don’t load fonts on the PC).
Other issues I have been able to resolve by using Acrobat instead. Especially if you need to make changes to bitmaps to reduce the size of the output file. But most of the time. Apple’s implementation of PDF is intended to make it Portable, but it does little in the way of optimizing the output.

I eagerly await the simplification of my workflow!

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Also for rotation. Matching raster orientation and grain sometimes is desirable and sometimes not. Most of the time you want to put the longest section of the engrave horizontally for efficiency’s sake. Sometimes you want to change that up to save materials or to get the raster cross grain to wood.

You can’t rotate at the moment a raster in the GFUI. Most of the time I keep my bitmaps separate and place them in the GFUI, but when precision or rotation is involved, I’ll pop it in the vector.

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We’ll see later today! I’ll tag you in the discussion about my trials and tribulations of using PDFs. If I can’t get exactly the cuts I want, at least I can share the info gathered. Sounds like the tests will be helpful to at least one person - you.

Thank you for sharing! Very cool, very exciting!

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Yeah! I saw that I couldn’t do that last night, but I thought I must be missing something! Thanks for clarifying that.

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No worries…MY lack of knowledge is still amazing, too, and I would venture to guess that it will remain that way for quite some time. But then, that’s part of the reason why having a Glowforge is so darned much fun! I’d be more than happy to help in any way I can. I think you will be surprised at how much you really do know…especially from reading on the forum for so long, now. :relaxed:

I have 36" exterior doors - it was no problem. I took it out of the box to carry downstairs though because the interior doors are 32" and I figured there’d be knuckle smacking on doorframes and such.

Grab some Baltic Birch off Amazon - I use the 60 count 12x12s for my classes so I have a ton of it around. Use that to test new stuff so you don’t burn through PG on failed experiments. The PG is great for when you’ve got your design nailed.

Thanks for reminding me! Meant to mention that yesterday. I had no problem at all getting it through my normal size door. (Sorry. I have no idea what the measurement is. I’m gonna call it “standard.”) I mean, I couldn’t hold the handles through the door, but it fit without having to tilt it even a little bit.

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Corel X8 makes a ton of difference with the K40. With the GF I’m doing about 50/50 Corel vs Inkscape. Since I teach in Inkscape if it’s not already a CDR file or I don’t already have it open I’ve been tending to use Inkscape over Corel.