Puzzle Size Issues

I have been working on a rather large puzzle, 2’ x 3’ for a friend to use with his math students. I have designed this in Affinity Designer with no issues.

Andy Puzzle Layout.pdf (178.4 KB)

Where I run into problems and this was a test of patience, is getting a repeatable size for each piece. I print these out in blocks to maximize the sheets used. Using scale resizing is not something that is workable because of the innies and outies that change the overall dimensions. I had to manually resize each image and not realizing that 1/8" throws everything off. Trying to manually repeat the size was a challenge, but one that I got through.

You can see from the attachment how dimensions change and I focus on just the main body of the piece to get the size, however this is at this point visual reference to the rulers.

Puzzle Diversity.pdf (10.1 KB)

There has go to be a better way to go about this, we are considering making a 4’ x 8’ puzzle, however with the amount of scrap generated I am very apprehensive to take this project on. I am doing this Pro bono to support the school so this could get expensive quickly. As an example, I was asked to rework 3 new pieces and it took 4 cuts to get the right size.

Another question is how much do I take out for the laser cut?

Any help is appreciated…
Bob

Problems and Support is for opening trouble tickets regarding the machine or software with Glowforge staff. They can’t help you with design questions, so I’ve moved this to a more appropriate section.

Okay, I don’t use Affinity Designer, so someone who knows how to use that program might have better information for you…

But when I open your sample PDF files there in Affinity, it throws up an Estimate for the DPI value, meaning perhaps that the value was not specified when you saved it.

So something in how you are saving the PDF (the DPI value) might be different from what the Glowforge interface expects. I think it expects 96 DPI input value for AD files…try changing or setting that value in your Preset output settings to see if it quits resizing.

Alternatively, if you always create your files on a 12" x 20" artboard or canvas (whatever it’s called in that program) there is a workaround that corrects for that on files from various input sources. So if you get into the habit of always designing on a 12" x 20" canvas it should also bypass the resizing issues.

Anyway, try that until someone more knowledgeable wanders by…

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