Shift key to constrain in app.glowforge

I only said to be able to constrain the move up and down and left to right as the rotation tool… never mentioned about designing anything on it BUT… :slight_smile: BUT would be nice to have only primitives sort of things like Circle, Square, and a line (line would be amazing to cut out the “Junk” part of the wood and keep the rest of it “like new” without the cut outs… :slight_smile:

What you guys think? OBVIOUSLY not to create a design in it :slight_smile:

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:slight_smile:

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LOL… i realise that quite a long time! but it interest how things go wide! LOL

It’s always fun tho ! :stuck_out_tongue:

I think it feels more like a RIP than a print driver. RIPs have a fair number of processing options that are similar to, and informed by, but separate from the design process.

My RIP (Onyx) can re-size the image numerically or based on material size, can slice and split the image into panels for oversized multi-part prints, tile the image, make copies, rotate, mirror, add finishing marks, print info. This is also where you tell the printer what kind of media you are feeding it, and access color/quality/speed/post-heat settings.


It also keeps a list of previous jobs, settings intact, to inspect or re-run any time.

My plotter software (Cutting Master 4) is also quite similar. It too can re-size, mirror, tile, copy, slice, split, auto-weld, and rotate (among other things). This is also where you tell the plotter what kind of media you are feeding it, and adjust the cut style/tool pressure/offset/speed.

I don’t design in either program, but the options available mean that I can use a single source file, regardless of how many copies I want, how I need to fit them to my media, what size they are, or if they need to be mirrored for reflective/transparent applications.

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Sure. And as @jbmanning5 pointed out, printer drivers are giving some crazy amount of options these days. But I don’t want any of that to detract from my point… Expectations should be set appropriately. I will never expect the Glowforge app to become a design tool. Are there times when I don’t care about aspect and just want my job to fit a swath of material and wish I could simply drag to the edges of the material? Sure. But I stopped letting it bother me a long time ago. And maybe that’s a factor, too. Not everybody’s had their unit as long as I have. Maybe I felt differently about these things a year or so ago.

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I expect no design tools. No design tools were promised.
I expect improvements in layout tools.

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well said

I run two monitors and have found that Inkscape behaves itself well if I put the open drawing down on the bar before opening another. I do have to open it in the side screen and drag the drawing to the ,ain’t screen a lot but I keep all my tool windows on the side screen.

I keep IrfanView beneath on the side screen and the GFUI on the main screen aND pick whatever I need on the bar, sometimes Gimp is there as well and the side screen gets those tool floaters as well but I have little trouble jumping programss