Pottstown, PA here...The eagle has landed

Everything Else
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I’m certainly hoping that PDFs (when created properly) will be able to be recognized as vectors also. That would certainly reduce the amount of tracing I’ll need to do. I read about the fact that PDFs can be of 2 types, either raster or vector. I use a Mac and have tried PDF creation through their print dialog 2 ways. I printed to PDF Preview, which may not work and then did a couple of files printing to the Adobe PDF 8.0 “Printer” that was installed by the operating system. I do hope that results in a raster operation where colors and lines can be assigned different cut/score/engrave options in the :glowforge: user interface.

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I’m looking forward to lots of options…and I’m trying to bookmark all kinds of free vector graphic sources. By the time I have my :glowforge:, my “Glowforge” bookmarks folder will have many more items than my “3D Printing” one.

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Well yeah, but illustrator wears them as a point of pride… It uses some arcane conventions that would make sense to a printmaker from the 1800s, but to the rest of us not so much.

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I was involved with desktop publishing in the 1990s, among other things. I suspect I’d be familiar with those.

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but even most of those conventions date back to the movable type era… get your leading out…

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If you post one of them here, I’d be willing to bet someone would check them out to see what exactly you have. Or, if you private message me one, I’ll be happy to take a look at how the file is set up.

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I have definitely used PDFs to print stuff on the GF. The mac print dialog->PDF does not produce good PDFs, nor does other ways of creating PDFs that are essentially printing to a PDF (like the adobe print). What is your source material? Often it is fairly easy to translate that stuff to a vector format of some type, or a hybrid vector/bitmap.

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I’m so thankful I stumbled upon CorelDraw so many years ago with my first laser back in 2000. Universal lasers actually recommends it since it plays well with vectors and such.

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Or upper case and lower case.

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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.

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

The forum is always helpful.

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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?

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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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