Rotating a design causes Glowforge to ignore elements?

Hi there,

I’m working on some last-minute Christmas gifts, and found a weird bug/issue.

When I import this design, if I try to do the cuts and engraves, everything works great. The horizontal lines, the text, and everything work well. However, if I rotate the design 90 degrees to fit in the bed, then the Glowforge completely ignores the horizontal lines and I end up with just the text cut out. I’m almost certainly doing something wrong here, but I’d really appreciate any help or ideas of workarounds.

Thanks!

///Will

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My GF isn’t turned on right now, but I went ahead and loaded your design into the UI. Not sure what material you’re using, so I just put in PG draft board. Everything looked fine to me…even rotated. I went ahead and let the PG setting populate and without actually printing your file, it sure seems as though it would work. I’ve certainly never experienced that issue myself.

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Thanks for taking a look at it!

It looks fine in the UI, but when you run the print preview, it just runs the glyphs for the letters and doesn’t cut the lines. When I rotate the design in Illustrator, it works fine. It’s really odd.

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I just copy/pasted your SVG onto a new artboard (20"x12") with which I always start new projects. Your file comes in at 14.5" W x 14" high. Is that accurate? If so, it makes the size too large for the Glowforge’s available working area. That might have something to do with it. Not sure…

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It could be the usable bed area for engraving/cutting. Cuts or scores give you more usable area of the bed, but engraving needs more space for the laser head to swing back and forth so it has some “braking” to do. In order for it not to hit the sides and without abrupt halts, that area is designated as unusable. Here’s an example of what I mean using your file.

On the bottom and right side are the no-no areas represented by diagonal lines. But when I turn your design

That line now extends to the left hand side as well. Like Xabbess has said, your design is a bit too tall for either direction, and I too use an artboard, only I set mine to 19x11. I chose those that ratio based on the Glowforge not being able to use the entire bed, even on a good day.

I’ve actually found that the left hand side is something like 5/8" unusable with engraves, the right hand side is closer to 1/2", and the bottom is about 1". So as long as I don’t fill my artboard to the brim, I am pretty successful with getting nice placement when doing large orders with a lot of prints going on one board.

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I had no idea of that, that is totally it. Thanks so much for your help.

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I’m glad you resolved it! I’m going to close this thread. If you run into any other trouble, please start a new topic, or email us at support@glowforge.com. We’re here to help!