Print Area changes

Hello everyone.

I am wondering why the print area changes sometimes the print area is a good size another time it can take an inch off the left and right. sometimes this happens randomly other times it happens when I have multiple items on the same project.

I will try to attach a short video. look at the left and right margins as I select different designs.

8 Likes

I’m sure this can look random but it’s not, it’s all about your head having time to slow down and reverse direction, you’ll see it mostly in the engraving the lesser degree in cutting and scoring.

5 Likes

Or, to put it all another way: search is your buddy, so many threads about this if you just know what to look for. Searching for “why print area change” does the trick:

https://community.glowforge.com/search?q=Why%20print%20area%20change

1 Like

The margins narrow for designs with an engrave step, and they grow larger the faster you set the engrave speed. The faster you engrave, the more room the print head needs to slow down and change directions during each pass, which is what that margin is for. The margins also depend on the type of artwork: if you upload a raster image (instead of a vector) you can tell it to print in the margins while changing direction, which reduces the effective margin size.

@evansd2 When someone does that search, now and in the future, they may now find this thread. And it would be nice if this thread had the answer to the question, so it wasn’t just a cyclical reference back to the search results. :slight_smile:

7 Likes

Oh wait, you mean like this?

The idea of referring people to searches is to prevent future duplicate threads. Putting the answer in this thread is not a bad idea, but even better would be linking to a previous better thread that answers it thoroughly. That way we don’t just keep restating the same stuff over and over.

Oh wait, you mean like this?

:slight_smile:

2 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 32 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.