Suggestion: increments, read from file, date

Couldn’t find a SW suggestion section so I guess they go here?

I recently got a cheap Chinese dot peen machine working for a friend and it has some features in it’s software that would be excellent for the GF to have once the UI is able to have us add text/save files directly in it.

  1. Increment coding. Just being able to select a set of numbers in some text we have added in the UI and tell it that after each engrave we want it to increment the number by X amount immediately. This is nice when you need a unique identifier on each item (ie: serial number)

  2. Read from file. I’d like to be able to upload a text file and have glowforge read each line and replace text that I select with that line. Similar to 1 but requires more manual input and is good for things like guest names, ect.

  3. Date Coding. This is mostly useful when we can save designs but it would be nice to have designs saved with the code for the glowforge to grab the current date off our system and input it in the same area.

Obviously these are down the road suggestions but I wanted to post them before I forgot about them and how useful they are (individually numbered art pieces? who wouldn’t want that)

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Right now the GF doesn’t handle text (you have to convert text to curves in a separate program) so these aren’t really feasible at the moment.

I don’t think they have any plans to work with text soon, as that brings along a lot of issues regarding fonts, etc. But if they do ever add text support then these things would be great additions!

I don’t really remember where it is but dan has mentioned that basic drawing (and hopefully text) is part of the plan for the UI so this would be something to implement after that obviously.

Supporting text from a user is different than supporting your own text in your UI since you can limit the fonts to whatever you want on the input.

We had a three about this a while back (Feb, 2016)