Stuck on something in inkscape

im trying some new things in inkscape today and it is all going pretty well. i opened some vectors in photoshop and copied them over to a template that i made for a door knob sign.

all was smooth when i did a simple design but as i tried more complicated designs i noticed that each time i copied and pasted a vector it counts as a new step for the gf after i upload the svg. so, does anybody here know how to combine objects in inkscape so that the gf treats them as one step?

im sure this is probably a noob question, i tried searching the forums and a google search to no avail. also sorry if this post is in the wrong place

If your paths/fills are the same color then they’ll be one step.

If you upload a sample file we might be able to help more directly but generally it comes down to color.

To fix it is usually simple enough: Select all of the things you want to be one step and set them to the same stroke(cut)/fill(engrave) color.

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Also this is very helpful:

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lol okay well i thought i was working with all black shapes but they may be some slightly different colors. here is an upload of my file

welcomehome|8x11

edit: weird when i click that link after uploading, a lot of my design is missing

also i keep getting this message when i upload my design

error|556x252

I just imported your file into inkscape and it appears ok. I did however insure the wording was selected and I hit “path, combine” then while still selected hit “object to path”. After that I uploaded to the glowforge and it is 2 steps. I didn’t print it but I think it will work fine.

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It’s more a warning message than an error message. If your design results in a lot of steps (not sure how many is a lot to glowforge) on the left hand side of the screen you see this helpful message.

All I got in your design was some text and the cutout of what appears to be a door hanger. Needless to say it uploads fine to the glowforge. When uploading .svg files to Discourse (the software that powers this forum) a good practice is to zip the file first, upload second.

The only thing I would recommend from your partial file is to go to File -> Document Properties and set the width to 20 inches and the height to 12 inches. Doing this to all of your files will keep you from running into some other problems. The problem in your OP, unfortunately, is not one of them.

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yea for some reason when i upload my svg it wont include the layer containing vector art

funny because when i upload to the gf app it doesnt delete anything
here is a capture of what i was making
capture|338x500

as well as it in the gf ui, idk why it deletes items on the forums
screen|690x459

The forum software was created by Discourse and the gf ui was written by Glowforge, that they behave differently in processing svgs isn’t to be expected, but also not surprising. As I wrote above, you’ll have to zip up the file and post it if you want any help. On the face of it, it shouldn’t be doing that. It doesn’t happen to me if I copy and paste an object, but without the entire file not much any of us can do.

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yea i figured i should zip it after seeing other people do the same before, should have gone with my gut in this post. thanks for the clarification, sorry to reply the next day, i just quit working on the forge after my girlfriend got home. heres a zip of what i was working with, pardon the language in a layer.
welcomehome.zip (750.7 KB)

The decorative elements are rasters, not filled vectors. Each raster is treated as its own thing in the gf ui. Your text is a filled vector and because it is the same color, is treated as one thing by the gf ui.

If you want your rasters to be a single operation in the gf ui, you’ll need to save them as a single object. There are several ways to do this. What I did was select each raster object and then did a File->Export PNG Image. In the export dialog I chose to export the selection (all of the raster I just selected.) I then imported the png I made of all the elements. Now they are a single raster. Delete each of the individual rasters and place the mega-raster.

The next issue is your text. When using a script font it is good practice to combine any two touching letters using the Path->Union. If you don’t do this you can wind up with some interesting, and generally unwanted, outcomes. This is not a thing with non-script fonts. In the attachment you can see how I unioned the elcome of Welcome, to, our and ome of Home. I left the capital W and H alone because as independent letters they will be fine. I then grouped all of the text so it moves together.

Finally, I grouped the whole thing and rotated it. This will save you a lot of time after pressing the glowing teal button. It makes your grid lines moot, but there is no need for them anymore, so it’s moot.

Here is what I made from your file. I included the combined png in the zip. Comparing my output to your input hopefully you can see what I did. Once your girlfriend has left of course.
welcomehome.zip (409.4 KB)

I like your layer names :wink:. I’ve named a few like that myself. More than a few.

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