any advice appreciated. I have had issues since day one with my printer. It took almost 5 days for someone to reach me by email as no phone support is available. My unit works sporadically. Alignment issues seem to be a daily occurrence no matter how many times I calibrate. The biggest battle right now is more than likely a software issue with the app itself. All magic canvas images are distorted but now I am seeing that same distortion with using the seamless pattern design under the premium shape option. My floral border shows up jumbled along with other selections I make. Also the box in the lower left corner for grouping and ungrouping has been grayed out since day one of install. I keep getting a rendering design message that takes forever to update and sometimes doesn’t ever update. I am opening and closing way too often. I don’t have these problems with any other sites for design so wifi is not the issue.
Note finally when support reached me the first time they keep sending emails asking me to print gift of good measure about five times to correct all issues which has been pointless. My other issues were never addressed. I later receive a response after 3 weeks of waiting that I am ineligible for a return even though it has not been 30 days. They claim 30 days or 50 prints whichever comes first. Problem is I haven’t even reached 50 prints due to printing issues. When I made them aware that I have not went outside either parameter for return they hesitated and have not emailed me back until days later and passed me off to an “engineer” by email. I am convinced I am dealing with A.I. for customer service because I received the same generated email from this “engineer” that I first received in my original interaction with the first customer service rep. Asking me once again to print gift of good measure and send pictures. So for kicks, I actually did this step AGAIN and sent photos. That was a week ago and they have yet to respond. Printing more than 1/4 off is not ideal. Blurred or distorted preprogramed images, not helpful for designing. Grayed out options for engraving and ungrouping and the list goes on…
My advice is to keep working with Glowforge support.
But if you want to maximize your chances of someone here being able to guess what the problem is, you’ll need to include some information:
Screenshots/pictures of the problem. I (and a bunch of others) have been on this forum since the beginning and have read thousands of community support posts, but I still have no idea what “jumbled” means unless I can see it.
What operating system, version, browser, etc., are you using? Do you have an ad or content-blocking extensions installed?
More details of when and where the problem occurs. Is this on every use or just occasionally? Does it take a while to show up? Is it on every file or just specific ones? Does it affect the Glowforge-provided designs? Is it just the built-in tools or do you have problems with files you create and upload? What about files created by other people?
What have you tried and what were the results? Did you use incognito mode? A different browser? A different computer? Did you create a new Glowforge account and try it there?
Are these problems on the screen (it sounds that way, but again, I’m forced to guess) or when you print? If it’s distorted on the screen, does it print distorted as well? What actually happens when you print the Gift of Good Measure? Does that load ok? Does it print ok?
Is there a minimal reproducible test case? (E.g. “start a new design, click here, do this, expect to see X, but get Y instead”) Could you demonstrate it?
Unless you just wanted to vent frustration and get sympathy, in which case you’re welcome to leave those details out and we can shift to commiseration.
so to answer your questions:
*Hard to continue communication with support when they don’t respond and then when they eventually do they offer irrelevant troubleshooting that completely avoids issue at hand (for ex: my first question was why do I have a large gap in my door upon unboxing and is this normal. I included pics. After back and forth communication they still refuse to answer the question even with detailed photos)
*I will add screenshots
*Operating system is Mac
*Problem occurs every time now (before was occasionally)
*It does NOT happen with uploaded designs only Glowforge provided designs as I previously stated
*Have not tried incognito mode
*Safari is my browser
*Problems are both on the screen and print jumbled and distorted as they appear on screen
*Printing gift of good measure turns out fine
*test case YES I duplicated the issue with other glowforge designs as well to test and see if it was just a fluke with one design but previously used designs that I was successfully able to use in premium design last week are now suddenly not showing up correctly. What would cause this do you think?
Ok, so there are a number of things you mentioned, but I’m going to skip over alignment and connectivity and door gaps, because they’ve been covered a lot of before and you can just read previous posts. The one that intrigues me is the distorted designs in the app.
We’ve established now that you’re using Safari on a Mac. If I were in your shoes, I would try using Chrome. And I would try in a private or Incognito window, because those disable browser extensions. If I had a second computer, I would try that as well. You’re seeing weird behavior in the Glowforge web application: identify some variables that can affect that and try changing them. What I can tell you is that your problem seems very unusual, and if it were a problem with the software it is much more likely that other people would be seeing the same problem. So my guess is that this is only happening to you, on your computer, for some reason. And that’s why I’d start with the most likely (and easy) things you can do to start eliminating possible causes.
Personal anecdote: I had a browser extension installed called “Stop the Madness”, that prevents web sites from doing annoying things. But it turned out that it was also preventing the Glowforge web site from working. It took me a while to realize, and I suffered for months with not being able to paste images or right click before I suddenly thought “maybe this isn’t a bug, I should try some experiments”.
thanks Chris!
My thoughts exactly that if it were software wouldn’t other users be experiencing the same. I do have other devices but they are all MAC as well. I am struggling right now to upload a screenshot of the distorted design pattern. It says screenshot file is too large. I tried compressing and it still won’t let me upload here. So I try to login on my cell phone and upload from there and glowforge won’t let me in from my cell for some reason. Feeling defeated. I would really like someone here to see these photo images of what I am seeing. I even printed to see if it was a glitch on the screen but no it prints distorted as well.
update finally was able to upload ONE screenshot. Let me know if you can see what I am talking about. TIA!
I’m not in front of my Mac right now, but I believe if you press Command-Shift-3, it will take a screenshot and leave it on your desktop. You can then drag that into a post on the forum.
I see the picture you uploaded… I’ve never used the Patterned Line feature before, so I just tried it out myself, and this was the first thing that happened:
I think I know what’s going on here. The steps I used were as follows:
Using the Premium design features, click Insert Shape, then Insert Line.
With the line selected, open the Patterned Line dialog. Select mode: Seamless pattern, and the rose pattern.
Click Create Pattern
This results in the same pattern you got, and I think the reason for this is that the “seamless pattern” is meant to be used on something like a circle, where the ends connect:
If you try to create a seamless pattern on a line, it doesn’t know how to make the pattern repeat endlessly, since the line doesn’t connect to itself.
In my opinion, there should be a warning message about this, rather than just doing something confusing.
Thanks for trying but that’s not the case. I used it successfully last week. Since last night this started up in the app. It should print a line of flowers just as seen in their drop down menu. Are you experiencing the same with Magic canvas images? I am! I have been experiencing this distortion there before here in premium pattern so I simply chalked it up as an issue with the magic canvas being new and kinks needing to be worked out. This is a whole other level of issues on top of everything else I am dealing with.
Since you open your comments by saying you are open to any advice, I suggest you work through the Glowforge tutorials and become familiar with the basic operation of the interface. The problems you are describing don’t seem to be machine related, but rather interface related. I also suggest that you use Chrome or Firefox rather than Safari. I strongly urge you to put inexpensive material in the machine and learn the quirks of the interface. Cardboard woks fine while you are learning.
Perhaps we could address one issue at a time. Let’s take your statement about the box in the lower left for grouping and ungrouping. Please share a screenshot of that box, as to my knowledge the icons in the left are for measurement and alignment. They don’t have anything to do with grouping.
As the “Gift of Good Measure” is a standard design of known perimeters they can look up what Glowforge actually did. This is the point of asking you to print the design. With all issues of design quirkiness eliminated and as that design tests all three modes they can diagnose an awful lot.
They can also modify very precisely (from there) many things about how your particular machine actually works. A good example is if distortion is an issue and by exactly how much with the actual numbers.(you will not know they did this and that is why they ask you to print the GOGM again)
