Dan announced several months ago they discontinued Snapmarks deployment. If your machine has it, they will remain, but no new machines will get them. Snapmarks were on the path to the passthrough feature and that is where they are focusing their resources.
The key to jigging is that for each file where the artboard is 12"x20" the glowforge cuts/engraves in the same exact place. Load a file into the glowforge, do one cut. Open the lid, change your material or whatever, go back to Home, turn the glowforge on and off, load that file again and that cut will be in the same exact place. So. if you have a 4x4 slate coaster, you can make a file with your engrave placed how you want it inside a 4x4 square. You cut that square out of a piece of cardboard, do NOT move the cardboard, drop in your slate coaster and then you do the engrave. It will be exactly where you positioned it in your file. You wind up burning through a lot of cardboard this way, but that is what Amazon is for.
I missed that announcement and have been patiently waiting for snapmarks to come to a glowforge near me. This is disappointing.
I don’t fully understand this. The are you referring to the print area of the glowforge? Or do you mean you make the dimensions of the svg file 12x20 in inkscape (or similar program)? Or am I completely misunderstanding this?
Wait… snapmarks are working and on some machines… but not getting deployed to any more? I’m really starting to get tired of what is sounding like arbitrary crap. Some people get features… some do not… You can’t buy a filter separate from the cutter, but if you want to buy it at the time of buying the cutter you can have one…
Exactly. Work area size in any software that I’m aware of doesn’t matter. Just design it and import it. GFUI doesn’t care what the workspace size was in inkscape or illustrator or whatever.
It checks in the background for what size the document is. If it’s an aspect ratio that matches up to 12x20 (3x5 aspect ratio), it knows how to scale a file if the file is unitless, or defined in pixels.
Why? Because different programs use different default interpretations of pixels per inch. If you make a 1” square in Illustrator that in the SVG code is defined as 72 pixels (what Illustrator uses - 72 PPI), when you bring it into the app, it will be a different size since most browsers use 96 PPI.
Odd. If true I definitely stand corrected. But so far I haven’t seen any difference from what I created and what I have printed. And I’ve used corel draw, inkscape, and illustrator. But perhaps I have had the settings set correctly from the get-go. Good to know.
For example, I’ve lost power cutting puzzles before, which obviously results in a lost job. Since I set my document up as 12x20” and didn’t move it in the app, I’m able to go back into it, delete out the paths that have already been cut, upload a new file, and continue the cut with exact precision and without cutting lines that have already been cut.
So I’m on board with the sizing in Inkscape now; however, when it comes to jigs, how do you remove what you cut out and how do you insert what you want to engrave without disrupting the surrounding jig?
Agreed. I’ve never had the GF UI “resize” anything I’ve created, and I’ve been working with a blank workspace for quite some time (the borders/edges bother me when I have no use for them! OCD much?)
I’m struggling to remember what I was working on a while back, but I was adjusting sizes down to 10ths of a mm in Inkscape, and the parts were cutting exactly as expected.
I must have botched something pretty badly. I made a design in inkscape with a square and a design inside the square. I cut out the square (setting the design to ignore). I removed the square I cut out, flipped it over (I’m sure I didn’t even have to do this part, but I wanted to try removing what I cut out), then engraved the design with the square set to ignore. The design was way off. It was over 1" off when the square I cut out was about 1" on a side.
Maybe I changed a setting or moved the workpiece in between steps. I’ll have to try this again. The workpiece I started with was 12"x20" - it filled the width of the crumb tray completely such that it couldn’t move side-to-side at all and I’d have to really force it to move forward or backwards.
Did some tests yesterday with illustrator and I was surprised. I created a 2" circle and exported it as SVG and when importing it into GFUI it came in as a 1.5" circle. So that… is odd. I then created an interlocking hexagon (like catan pieces)… and once again those were significantly smaller than the original design. I tried it with 12x20 workspace and 72dpi and 300dpi (I don’t think I had an option in illustrator to do 96dpi). So now I’m a little confused as to what settings I need to do in illustrator. I’ll have to do some more testing.
Is the “responsive” box checked or unchecked for exporting the SVG? There has been lots of discussion regarding resizing of files. Here is one thread: GFUI is resizing/rescaling my SVG file. Why?
