Students able to use

I am trying to get my MS students to use my Glowforge. They created simple “tags” or sign on powerPoint. How do I cut them out from that. I have tried to print them and just use the trace but not all the details get traced well…See picture below. I also tried to convert into a .svg that that worked but I can not get the file placed on the area to print…I added a screenshot of that as well!

Can you export as PDF from PowerPoint, and skip the trace? If you have Premium you can add a cutline pretty easily.

I do not have premium. I can export it as a PDF but then it does this…A big square around everything and when I ignore the big square it the other picture looks blurry

Looking at that it appears you are trying to cut every line? The entire insides will cut out and that is probably not what you are going for. I would imagine you want to score the inner design and cut the outer circle as well as the smaller circle right?
Something like this perhaps?
Help

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If they are using PC’s, Gravit Designer (designer.io) works pretty well. I have used it for a couple years with my Middle School students. I’m not sure what the issue is now, but on Chromebooks, any time they attach an image, it always claims it is linking the image, not embedding it. You might give it a try, it’s free.

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I was cutting the outside and little circle but just engraving the volleyball…should have I tried score instead of engraving?

Well since they are just lines it would be so much faster to score them. You can do either however.

After you told me that I tried to use the score and it says that bitmaps can not be scored. I think I was hoping that the trace feature would be a little better and see the details better

Try this one. It is an SVG.
Bball

I recommend you check out this tutorial on how to Make a Gift Tag from Scratch using Inkscape. I think it is a perfect match for what you are trying to do and adequately describes the difference between cuts, engraves, and scores.

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The inkscape does not work well on our computers and the kids struggle with it. We tried that last year and I was having to go back in and fix a lot of stuff.
I was really hoping that they could create something like that but using powerpoint and then I would print and trace but the trace feature doesn’t work great on all the tags.
When I tried to save as a .svg then I couldn’t get it onto the work space in the glowforge app. I can load it so it is on the side but can’t get it into the middle part so it can actually cut. Not sure why that doesn’t do it

Have you tried PDF?

So that one worked perfect. When I brought it in I could cut and engrave or score. Can you explane how you comforted the file to the .svg. I tried this website Online SVG image converter and that is when I couldn’t get it on the work plane to move and cut. It was just along the thumb nail part to the left

All I did was take your original pic into inkscape and use “trace bit map”. I erased your circle parts because the trace feature didn’t work well on them, and re-drew them with the drawing tools. Then I gave them different colors so you can assign them a different work flow.

Thank you all for the suggestions! I’m going to move this post to “Everything Else” so the discussion can continue there and you can continue to get help from the community.

I am not very good at inkscape. Is there any way you can take a quick video on bringing one of my files in and creating a .svg? I am sorry…here is a filestem .pdf (7.4 KB)

You do know that PDFs will import into the GFUI just as easily as SVGs, right? They are both “container” files that can contain both raster and vector images.

I don’t know how to do the video part but there are a ton of inkscape videos on youtube. If you look up “Logos by Nick” you can find anything you need to know about inkscape.

So the PDF you uploaded contains 3 elements. (FYI this is Affinity Designer, not Inkscape.) You have two vector shapes (heart and rectangle) and a raster image (state outline).

As currently configured, the filled heart and the state image are going to default to engrave, and the rectangle will default to cut. The heart is going to engrave solid, and then the state will try to re-engrave over the already engraved heart, or maybe the other way around. Neither is optimal.

I would suggest changing the heart from engrave to score when you load it in the interface. That will make it a workable file. :slight_smile:

I am so struggling with this. I have tried just tracing and half the time it doesn’t get all the black. I have tried to get it converted with inkscape and using the trace bitmap but then I can not figure out how to save it as a .svg after that…it is only using export as png and the PDF brings in a big rectangle the covers the whole thing and I click ignore on the side but it is hard to see what and where it is being cut. I am on the struggle bus big time. I watched a bunch of online videos to get to the trace bitmap and figured that out but now saving it as .svg from there I am struggling with big time