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.
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.
Well I’ll be damned! They filled in! How bizarre!
Thanks for the support guys!!!
You could feel the tension in the air 
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.
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.
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.
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…”
I have occasionally seen behavior similar to this on my CNC router and on my vinyl cutter.
I’m glad you posted this so when it happens to me I won’t freak out. 
That’s all assuming of course that for my birthday present tomorrow I get a special e-mail.
Although now I have a slightly modified version of the beginning of https://youtu.be/9l_YN-yRCVY stuck in my head.
Glad it worked out. I was beginning to think you got a GlowFrog
I’ve had these strange things happen to me on my CNC plasma cutter as well. Text blocks and CAM programs are really strange. I’ve had things look completely normal in the preview, simulation, toolpaths, etc. but the cuts happen in a completely different way. I use Mastercam for Solidworks though, that’s always strange.
Sounds like this is far more common than I knew. I hadn’t experienced anything like that prior. So I learned something.
My only CNC device so far, a vinyl cutter, picks its next cut like a drunk barber. It appears to be total chaos and maximum inefficiency.
In printing these tokens, there are 77 of them on a 17" sheet of proofgrade. In the cut it will skip one in the middle and a couple on an end, but returns to finish. (it doesn’t skip anything in the engrave)
Something else to be aware of regarding bed image, is the distortion from the wide-angle lens. It freaked me out. Let me explain.
For this file both the front and back images are nested together, with different colors so the UI recognizes them as separate operations. The workflow is to ignore the back and engrave and cut the front, then open the lid and flip all the tokens over in the hole they were cut from so the tokens are all registered for the next engrave - then ignore the front and the cut and engrave the back.
Whenever the lid is opened and closed the camera re-images the bed. looking at the new bed image the design to be engraved is offset to the left (maybe 1/8") on the left side, and to the right on the right side by the same amount. The middle looks correct.
looking like it is going to engrave slightly off, I was afraid (after a two hour engrave on the front) to press the button for fear it would be misaligned and trash the job. It didn’t, and printed perfectly. 
Took me a while to figure it out, of course that was after I bugged it to support and wasted their time. (they are really nice patient people)
When I open the file the image is placed by the software, (no distortion) but the bed image taken after the lid is closed is a camera image.
So the distortion is a function of the wide-angle lens, not misbehaving software as I had thought. No fault there, the camera is doing just what it was designed to do - identifying the sticker on the material, and enabling calibrating by locating the 
logo on the head right under it. Right under it is key. For tracing or image sizing/placement, work directly under the camera for best results.
In a situation like this, don’t worry about the distortion in the image. If nothing has moved, the machine will print exactly where it should. 
Frustrated and disappointed for sure, but don’t get mad. ( they are really nice people) More often than not my perceived problem with the machine has turned out to be either an issue with my file, or another failure on my part. Did I mention how nice those people are?
When I ran off my sheet of tokens, the GF played hop-scotch all over the bed for both the engraves and the cut layers, but eventually filled everything in. Pretty nerve-wracking on a 3-hour job. Luckily 
I had seen this behavior before while creating something that had hundreds of short scores around a circle. Had pretty much the same reaction as Tom the first time around. 
Wow. So that works for your flipping them over. How the heck would one account for the distortion when working with a bed full of pre-cut objects? So let’s say I had a bunch of coasters, or pencils, or pre-cut tokens. And I empty the bag of tokens on the bed willie-nillie, as it were. They take up the entire bed. And I drag my images onto each of them manually. Wanting my image to be centered on my token. How the heck can ya plan for that on the edges?
Yes, the motion planning is a mystery to me. I noticed when cutting tabbed boxes it cut around the pieces in an unbroken line one at a time. Next run I positioned the pieces closer to conserve material and it would jump to an adjacent line close to it, so there it seemed like proximity played a role - but not with the tokens. very close together, but would ignore one and come back at the end to finish.
Maybe the geometry figures in, the tokens being round and the boxes being square…
Thanks again Dennis. Mallory commented on what a nice guy you were. 
You would want to avoid having a bed full of individual items randomly scattered and have to position an image on them one at a time freehand. Serious time-killer and questionable accuracy.
Much easier and much quicker to have all the designs in a single file rather than futz with them individually, and for accuracy use a jig to register the material on the bed. In my case it was the sheet they were cut from. @marmak3261 made a jig for his pencils from cardboard if I remember. (BTW he was a huge help in my project)
He hooked me up with the images of each side in a different color nested in a single file. You engrave one side and cut them ignoring the other color (side), then open the lid, flip them and engrave the side you previously ignored. That way you only load one file. I highly recommend that workflow for the sake of ease, time and accuracy.
For just a few items using the ‘add Artwork’ feature, I would work in the center of the bed as close to the camera as possible for dragging and placing images freehand. The center line of the bed doesn’t suffer the distortion nearly as bad as the left/right edges. When scaling a cut to fit an existing shape I work right under the camera.
Edit; have you heard anything from support yet?