Here’s some things I’ve been thinking would be some nice ideas:
New Acrylic Colors: 50% Grey and 25% Grey, 5"x10", medium thickness (1/8")
Project Packs: E.g.: bundle together some draftboard with either some hardwood or plywood for a discount. Or some other similar combination.
Downloadable Product Price Spreadsheet (electronic form): Put together a simple spreadsheet with current prices for every item available through the store. Include columns for item name, size (length, width, thickness), cost, cost per square inch, quantity (user fills in this amount). Have totals at the bottom for item count and cost. This helps two ways: the user can go through their inventory with the printed sheet and see what they need to order. Second, users that are running a business can use the sheet to detail what’s needed for each project.
SVG DPI Adjustment: When uploading artwork for printing, it would really be nice if the app prompted the user for the dots per inch (DPI) used to design the artwork. Some vector graphic programs use different resolutions. E.g. EazyDraw 8.x can export SVG graphics at 72 or 90 DPI. Glowforge works exclusively at 96 DPI.
After receiving the DPI input, the app could adjust the rulers on the display accordingly.
‘Locking’ uploaded artwork. Have a toggle setting (during upload) for the artwork to be locked, so the user doesn’t accidentally re-size the artwork while moving it around the cutting surface.
Setting artwork to be proportionally re-sized simultaneously in X and Y axes.
Maybe combine #5 and #6 as a three-choice option: Free transform, proportional sizing, or locked; during the upload process.
Have you checked with “http://estreetplastics.com/”? They have a lot of selection in acrylics and their pricing is very reasonable. I’ve used them for transparent colors in the past and have been very satisfied.
Edit: I think I may be totally wrong. I just tried to find docs to support 96 as the standard dpi but didn’t have any luck. Maybe an svg guru can chime in.
Original post:
This isn’t much help, but… Pretty sure the svg standard is 96 DPI, and if so, it’s your program that needs to change. Inkscape made the transition, and asks if you want to convert old svg from earlier versions of the program if you try to open them.
It would be handy to have a dpi changer but I think that’s on them.
I looked for an old invoice and at that time I had ordered 4 different 12 x 24 sheets of different transparent colors and it looks like they were shipped FedEx ground to my address in Mich. for $11.76.
I may be misunderstanding what you’re wanting to accomplish, but vectors don’t have “dpi” - only rasters do. Vectors are infinitely resizable because they don’t have “dots” (pixels) like rasters do (like JPGs, PNGs, etc). So you don’t set a dpi. You just create it at whatever size you like and then resize when needed.
I had the same feelings - and what you’re saying is true - but there is a relationship between DPI and size depending on how the units are being output into SVG. If the default DPI for a design program is , say, 72 DPI, and the program creates the SVG with pixels as the units for the size you designed it at, the output will be off when you import it, since the UI is translating the view on the basis of 96 dpi.
For example, a 1 inch square in a program that has a default DPI of 72 and creates SVG’s with pixel units, will translate your design to a 72 pixel wide/high box. When imported, the system interprets 96 DPI as an inch, so your 1 inch box is now .75”.
You can scale the vector to any size you want without resolution loss since DPI is irrelevant to vectors, but it still has to create a view - and there can be a different interpretation between programs as to how that view is determined.
And if I understand it all correctly, that’s all unless you design on a 20x12” artboard (or 5:3 ratio as @chris1 determined). When you design a project (which I believe becomes the SVG viewbox) with that particular aspect ratio, it will scale your art to the expected size in the UI. (I believe the last paragraph is true; I haven’t played around with it since I do everything in Illustrator in a 20x12” artboard.)
honestly, i’ve abandoned SVG and just use PDFs now. haven’t had any of these kinds of issues. i created a glowforge preset that works, save a copy out of Illustrator as PDF and flawless so far. there are no DPI issues with PDF (beyond compression settings which are in my preset).
Just looked at the estreetplastic web site. They grey is about 2 cents cheaper per square inch for the 6 x 12 x 1/8 sheet. I’ll have the snoop around there a bit…
I’m contacting EazyDraw to see if they can make a code change in their next update to 96dpi.
Right now, when I need stuff in exact measurements, I used representative fractions: 1in/90 dpi = x/96 = 1.06in/96dpi. For each major dimension, I do the math and enlarge the diagram accordingly before exporting to SVG.
Unfortunately, there is no standard or default value. SVG files either have to explicitly say how big they are, or they have to exist in some context that gives them a scale, such as being embedded in a web page. Lacking any of that, they are effectively dimensionless and the only guidance the standard gives is to choose an “appropriate” size. This is why I’m so picky; I know Glowforge isn’t going to randomly change their software to interpret a pixel as 64000th of a furlong, but they’d be within their rights to do so, and I prefer to make sure all of the files that I’m creating are intrinsically dimensioned in inches.
If the SVG implementation is part of a user agent which supports styling XML documents using CSS2 compatible px units, then the SVG user agent should get its initial value for the size of a px unit in real world units to match the value used for other XML styling operations; otherwise, if the user agent can determine the size of a px unit from its environment, it should use that value; otherwise, it should choose an appropriate size for one px unit. In all cases, the size of a px must be in conformance with the rules described in CSS2 ([CSS2], section 4.3.2).