Love my glowforge but the app is still lacking some basic functionality. Could we please get a measuring tool in the app? I can’t begin to tell you how much of a difference that would make in my work.
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They have both of those things…
What are you trying to do?
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Edited my post, it was a draft from a while back - I’m really looking for a measuring tool to measure the distance, on screen between objects. For example, if I want to measure the distance from the end of piece of wood to the start of the engraving. Helps me make sure I’m centered up.
If that already exists, please let me know how to use it.
The measuring/positioning tool is pretty useful, in my experience. To measure from the edge of your material to the beginning of your engrave may require a bit of effort. If your lid camera has been calibrated and is accurate, I suggest you draw a rectangle around your material on the bed. Click on this rectangle and note the coordinates. Click on your artwork and note the coordinates. The difference gives you the distance from the edge/center of your material.
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The fact is that the ui doesn’t do that well at all.
My suggestion would be to draw the wood piece to scale I your art before uploading and use a proper editor like inkscape or illustrator or even affinity to align things properly.
If alignment is critical then cut a jig using that outline.
It sounds like more work but it’s not. What’s more work is hemming and hawing and trying to make the UI do stuff that it’s not good at. You ruin a piece or two and realize that you would been better served by following a more rigorous design process.
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TOO MUCH MATH! My head started to hurt! I wish they had a system set up for the printable area with snap guides si I could place things with little to no math!
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Oh I would love snap guides for sure!
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The very first thing to do is place you material on the tray as centered as you can, directly below the camera and do a manual focus at the center of material.
When I want to ensure my work is centered on my material, I run a piece of masking tape around the perimeter of my material. I then make a mark at the center of each side (usually with a Sharpie so it can be seen easily). Using the draw line function in the UI I draw two lines, one horizontal and one vertical, that goes the full distance across the work space on the screen and center them on each other. I center the cross I just drew with my design, then I select the design and cross and line them up with the marks I drew on the masking tape. Set cross lines to ignore and print. It works every time for me.
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Thanks for all the great suggestions everyone. I already mark up my work but back to the original request… a simple measuring tool that measures between to points wouldn’t be that hard to implement for GlowForge, and YES I know it wouldn’t be uber accurate but It would be close enough for most of the work I do. Pretty please Glowforge, let us have this simple little tool to make our lives easier.
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I expect all the suggestions are because people are trying to help you get the job done while we all wait for the measuring tool. GF may get the suggestion from this post but the official suggestion box is the Problems & Support area so a post there will get their attention.
They may acknowledge the suggestion with a simple “thanks, we’ll pass it along to the developers” or a statement from Dan that it’s in “the hopper”.
Neither is a commitment to provide it. We’ve seen a lot of stuff go into the hopper and never come out. But we’ve also seen stuff get released that match suggestions too. Just won’t be any real acknowledgement of what their plans are until it comes out if it does.
I expect this one might have a better than average chance of seeing the light of day since they are now offering basic design tools in the UI now.
Since it could be years before that happens, the suggestions here help make sure you can still get your work accomplished even if it’s not an optimal workflow.
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