PowerPoint issues

Community Support
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I created my first project using PowerPoint and saving as an svg file. I colored my cut lines with no fill blue and my score lines with no fill red. For the things that need engraving, I colored those black, including text. I sized the PowerPoint slide 12” wide by 11” high. I’ll be using a piece of 12” x 12” 1/4” thick basswood.

When I uploaded my svg file into the Glowforge app, here is what happened:

  1. It was way too big. For some reason it appears much larger than what I indicated for the PowerPoint slide size. I see that I can resize it in the Glowforge app, but it is really important that some of the drawing elements are exactly a certain size.
  2. All of the text was removed. I checked the help section and it could be because the font that I used in PowerPoint was not available in the Glowforge app. Not sure why that would matter if you just want it to etch the text and not edit it in the app. I’m hoping tgat all I need to do is to find the same font in both apps and use that.
  3. The circles are shaded once in the Glowforge app. They are not shaded in PowerPoint or in the svg image. I’m assuming that if they are shaded then it would etch the inside of the circles, but I don’t want that.

Thanks to anyone with advice. This is a large project for me and I’ve been working on it for weeks.

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2

I would get Inkscape to make the SVG’s. it is a free download.

I wouldn’t trust powerpoint as far as I could throw any of my computers.

also do a search for the inkscape palette so you only have a few colors to work with and can easily order your steps going forward.

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Text is not supported in the Glowforge interface when created in an outside program. It is not because the font is not in the Glowforge interface. Text must be converted to paths, and if it is a script font, you need to make sure and union the text or the Glowforge will not engrave where the script lines overlap. I can’t be much help with the size issue. If saving as a pdf is an option in PowerPoint, that would probably preserve the size better than exporting as an svg.

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Does the same thing happen if you use a PDF exported from PowerPoint instead of SVG?

(Btw, if you’re going to be doing big projects, I’d very strongly urge you to abandon PowerPoint as your design software)

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