The case of the missing "e"

So I gotta say I’m a little mad about this. Designed this job. Everything looks great as far as I’m concerned. An hour into the engrave I see I’m missing an “e” in “freedom.” Instead I’ve got “fre dom.” So I come out to the computer to fix my error and I see this!

I didn’t screw up, the GFUI did. In case you can’t tell, the purple is the actual image positioned in the GFUI. The red is the Printing window and it, unfortunately, is showing exactly what’s been engraved.

WHERE’D MY “e” GO?!

11 Likes

:scream: I’ve never seen this behavior and hope I never do. Make sure you beef it so that they can investigate.

3 Likes

is this vector? is it possible that the “e” is somehow just out of order and would be cut later?

3 Likes

Interesting!

I would let it do its thing, not move it and then just drop an e in there as a crutch so you don’t waste the job.

6 Likes

Yeah… Guess I’ll go do that…

It is. But I find it unlikely that it would do a letter later. I’m letting the job finish regardless so, at the very least, I can see if I like the design.

That’s going to be REALLY difficult for me I think. The text has been skewed (arbitrarily) and I doubt I’d be able to get the exact same lineup for just one letter.

UPDATE:
It skipped ANOTHER “e!” This time “races” became “rac s.” For the record, other "e"s have engraved no problem in this job.

29 minut s r maining at this point. (That was a joke.) I think I’ll hold off on the Support e-mail until I know the extent of the damage.

4 Likes

Uhhh, I think you done brok-ded it.

LEGGO HIS 'e’GO!

8 Likes

The motion control can be a bit mysterious. I wouldn’t panic until the job was finished. I’ve had skips like this that were filled in eventually.

7 Likes

Yes, wait until the job finishes. It might come back later and fill in those "e"s.

(One other thing to check is to make sure that you converted all of the text to outlines before running the job - it’s very easy to accidentally miss one.)

7 Likes

If it doesn’t go back and do the E’s, I’d be very curious to look at the file.

Guess I’m kind of lost on why you can’t just go back and reprocess the job with the potentially missing letters - are you worried about precision placement from the camera? Didn’t save an editable source file?

3 Likes

That’s promising! I’ll let y’all know in ~20 mins.

Yeah… It was a single text block. As such, it was all converted at once. I did actually have a second text block that, as a matter of fact, I did fail to convert. But that was completely separate and I smacked myself in the head when I realized I missed it.

5 Likes

I’m just not sure I can line it up exactly. And there’s a perspective to the letters that makes it more difficult. But I’ve been thinking about it. And I think if I go ahead and make all of the missing letters a different color, I should be able to try and set those to Engrave, and set everything else to Ignore. So I’ll give that a shot if they don’t magically fill in.

3 Likes

Well I’ll be damned! They filled in! How bizarre!

Thanks for the support guys!!!

27 Likes

You could feel the tension in the air :grinning:

10 Likes

You had this mostly right. The purple is what’s going to engrave/cut and the red is what’s been done (it’s the preview image). They match when it’s done. You want to worry when the red shows something that isn’t on your material or you’re missing something in the purple.

5 Likes

Glad it all worked out. For future reference, you can select multiple vector shapes and use the “create compound shape” command (if I remember correctly) in illustrator so a bunch of shapes all engrave together and there’s no jumping around.

17 Likes

Thanks for the tip! I suppose I don’t actually care as long as everything ultimately gets cut. I just never had anything like this happen before. Of course, I’ve also never engraved an entire prologue before. I’ll check out the compound shape command though. May make for slightly-faster engraves that way, too, I’d think.

6 Likes

glad it all worked out. i will say that this behaviour is very common to laser cuttings; motion planning always seems to have a little voodoo in it. as soon as i realized you took the pic mid cut, i was like “oooo i bet those e’s fill in at the end…”

9 Likes

I have occasionally seen behavior similar to this on my CNC router and on my vinyl cutter.

7 Likes

I’m glad you posted this so when it happens to me I won’t freak out. :slight_smile:

That’s all assuming of course that for my birthday present tomorrow I get a special e-mail.

7 Likes

Although now I have a slightly modified version of the beginning of https://youtu.be/9l_YN-yRCVY stuck in my head.

2 Likes