Simplified manual engraving options: 9/25/17 Latest Improvements

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Uhm… is there more to it? :rofl:

Keep in mind that many people haven’t seen the “before” user interface, so many have no clue as to what’s changed.

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Gonna require some experimentation. Looks like the settings you get to make on some of the image editing apps when converting to b&w with the different algorithms (besides the Floyd one supported by the GFUI).

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So I’m guessing that the sliders weren’t there before. Or perhaps the sampling of the stipple pattern underneath it, depicting the difference between “patterns” and “dots”…?

I’ve seen the UI and even I’m not sure what that’s about. Can we get a couple examples of use case? Something engraved with both options?

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It looks like you renamed the dithering options as well as changed the range boxes from numbers to sliders.

Looks ok IMO, but is there any way to see numeric readouts on those sliders? Sometimes I have to use specific ranges and that ability has been removed without a numeric readout.

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Mousing over the slider handles will give you the exact numbers. Functionality remains mostly the same, we’ve just taken customer feedback to make it easier to use and understand!

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Is there still a way to manually input numbers? If I want “25” or whatever setting, do I need to muck around with the sliders until I can get it?

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Please explain. Because I don’t know what I’m looking at or how to use it. I also don’t know what has been taken away from me in order to make this “simplified.”

Thanks!

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Holy kaka, that’s sweet! I just loaded it and played with it a bit on a lousy internet image and it cleaned it right up with a few tweaks of the slider. And the values do display while you are sliding.
(And I guess Map Grays to Power has become Vary Power now.)

Great job guys! I like the slider instead of the two range limits. It’s a lot easier to quickly view results on screen, even if most of the time I’d still probably leave it at 0 and 100 anyway for full range.

:heart_eyes::hugs:

To use it, load the image, click on one of the sliders and drag it, and watch what happens to the pink overlay that shows on the screen. It’s a visual representation of what you’ll get when it runs.

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This clears up some confusion I had on engravings. Thanks!

But I would like to also voice my desire to have numerical inputs as well. The sliders are great for 1 offs, but numerical inputs would be desirable for repeat jobs.

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I had suggested sliders on this in a feature request - but I was thinking more along the lines of sliders like with the power settings, with an input box. But, what I primarily wanted was the ability to change the input without the display flashing (so I had actually suggested first, just the ability to change the input box by using arrow keys). It made it nearly impossible to fine tune your values because when you went to retype the new value, the representation model would flash.

Unfortunately, I can’t test/play yet because it’s not showing up in my UI.

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Man, I’m really liking how this tool continues to evolve while it’s sitting in my shop!

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You need to turn off the machine, turn it back on, and let it update. (Didn’t show up in mine until I did that either - saw it for the first time this morning.)

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Done (a couple of times - last night and a few mins ago), along with logging out of the UI and back in. It’ll show up at some point. They do say it can take up to 24 hours. I don’t know if some of these updates are firmware updates vs just UI updates. It would be nice for the LED to flash and say “hey, woohoo, I’m updating the firmware!”

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You dropped a jpeg in? It didn’t show up in mine until I loaded an engraveable bitmap image. (Vector engraves don’t trigger it.)

At any rate, you’ll see it soon, and it’s cool. :sunglasses::+1:

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No. Duh… why would I do that? :rofl: I had just uploaded a vector circle (and did convert to engrave) that I was using to show the margins. It works properly with a JPEG that I just uploaded. I like that the display now changes real-time without “dropping out” like it did when you changed input values. The “pattern density” also makes more sense for me.

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Love that you can actually see what the engrave will be!

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And yet we’re all confused and don’t understand…

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This makes it appear that values outside the range of the sliders (those are sliders?!) will be a minimal amount of dithered mid-grayscale, and that black values – typically on the left in design apps – will have less fill than whites – typically on the right in design apps.

Something like this seems to make more sense to me, except the sliders (which become invisible at the ends of a rounded rectangle with almost the same radius):

gfuipatterns

Any image gray value below the left slider will be full power, anything above the right slider doesn’t engrave, anything in between is a gradient.

Or, am I totally missing how this UI is supposed to work and what it’s meant to represent?

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