I seem to be having a problem with cutout sections. There are sections in designs, say the eyes and nose holes in a skull design, that when I try to etch the design in acrylic, the GFUI sees it all as one section. If I switch to “score”, it sees them, but not in etch.
Has anyone else had this issue, and if so, how is it fixed?
My apologies if this has been addressed already, but I haven’t been able to find anything similar.
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Yes, for engraves you need to subtract the white fills out of vector engraves. (If someone could please link to the Vectors Made Easy tutorial, I’d greatly appreciate it.). 
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This one?
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Yes! Thanks so much! 
For vector art, score will follow the path of every shape, but etch will etch the interior of every non-white non-transparent shape. In both cases even if they’re overlapped by another shape.
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Thank you, I just read through that, and it absolutely makes sense to not have the “island fill”, and where I’m running into the problem is, I don’t have white in the fill.
I’m using Corel, because I do a lot of vector graphics in it, and I’m exporting the files as .svg to the Glowforge. Some of the files work PERFECT, and some just don’t.
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Do you have an example one that doesn’t? Folks here will fix it up in no time and even help you find and fix in other ones.
I’m actually attempting to upload an example here now, but it’s just coming up blank.
Sometimes it’s easier to put it in a zip file first. There’s a whole separate artform around getting discourse to show it the way you see it. Not to mention, it changes it and for our purposes here, you want folks to see the file you’re working with.
GAH! I got a “Sorry, new users cannot upload attachments.” message.
Argggh.
I’ll PM you my email address and I can post it on your behalf.
Or you can share a link from Dropbox. It’ll let you post links right?
At my current status, no. I’ll be happy to email it to you, thank you.
There is a known issue with interpretation of winding order on some Corel Draw exported SVG files. You can temporarily get around it be saving the affected files as PDF and the interface should interpret them correctly.
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It might be moot now that @jules as provided the work around, but here’s the file that @MichaelKoske wanted to post, but couldn’t
TMNT-coaster.zip (27.4 KB)
Y’all go ahead and play with it and see if you can come up with some other answer…I’m computer crippled for a while. It might not be that and I can’t test it. 
I’ll give that a shot now, thanks.
If you want to dive down the nitty gritty details of the winding issue you can check out this thread:
I’m a Coreler myself 
Check to see if it’s really not filled by drawing a big box colored blue or something. Send it to the back. If you don’t see blue than that section is not transparent (null-filled).
I did a video walkthrough of how to create islands using Corel (and did run into the winding order problem with one of the objects). I did it for @davidgal2 using his design so I’d need his okay to link to it on Youtube.
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Hehe, that’s exactly what I normally do. 
I actually found a fix. It adds one more step, but it’s worth it to save the hassle.
I just saved the Corel file, then opened it in Inkscape, saved it from there as a .svg, and BINGO! It works!
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Not just Corel. I’ve run into this with Affinity Designer, too.
Mixing the even-odd and non-zero winding rules in the same file sometimes results in weird results on the GF.
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