Triangle of Skipped Engrave Lines

Problems and Support
#1

In the picture below you can see a triangle of lines that got skipped when engraving. I believe this is a software issue because if it was a hardware issue, the lines would not have starts and ends forming little triangles of alternating on/off engrave pattern.

This is certainly not the first time I have seen this and have typically just scraped or colored in the skipped lines, but it is beginning to annoy me. It ALWAYS forms a triangle, and the triangle ALWAYS forms on a flat side of the art (never on a curve). I would guess this is a strange bug in the engrave pattern dithering in GFUI

Note: I am using JPEG files embedded in SVG files to preserve scaling.

glowforge-defect
glowforge-defect.jpg1154Ă—866 265 KB

#2

There are definitely some bugs in how the system converts art to laser fire. Try cutting an array of circles, it will go nuts.

#3

Which way are the letters oriented with respect to the engrave? Did you fill in all those parallel vertical lines? Also, does this error show up on the preview? It looks really weird, and I wonder if your jpegs are tickling some kind of rendering bug. (In general, as you probably know, jpeg is not the format you want to use for text, because it’s not designed for super-sharp high-contrast edges; if you could turn your lettering into SVG paths with fill, things might work better. Which is to say, this way should work, but another way might actually work.)

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#4

I’m not an expert on illustrator but I’ve noticed when I’m using embedded JPEG, it does not preserve scaling, someone please correct me if I’m wrong on it. If I scaled the image larger it gets more pixelated as I would expect from a JPEG. I have converted my embedded image into vector by using the “image trace” feature.

I wonder if your software has a similar limitation for embedded JPEG.

#5

When I say “preserve scaling” I am not talking about image resolution. It’s still very much a raster image embedded into a SVG and can not be scaled up without getting pixelated. The reason I embed the image in an SVG is because I have had issues when bringing JPG / PNG files into GFUI it ignores the image dimensions (DPI). It may not have this bug anymore but I haven’t tried in a while. It’s worth noting that I use this machine for production and actually have another employee of mine do the engraving

TLDR; To ensure the 3" artwork I designed imports into GFUI at 3"…I embed it in an SVG

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#6

Thanks for the clarification, I hadn’t thought about it that way. Makes perfect sense.

#7

Thanks for letting us know about this. I’m afraid I’ll need a bit more information to investigate further. Could you please share the svg file with the embedded jpeg?

If you aren’t comfortable sharing the file here, you can email it to us at support@glowforge.com

Thanks in advance!

#8

Just to let you know another way around that if you are designing your own artwork…I believe the GFUI interprets raster images at 96 DPI. So if you design at 96 DPI, the image is going to retain it’s relative sizing. (Or you can continue to put it into an SVG file to retain the size, whichever is easiest for you. I find it easier to just drop it into an SVG, since I’m usually adding cut lines.)

#9

Then you’re stuck with an incredibly low-res image. :slight_smile:

#10

It’s been a little while since I’ve seen any replies on this thread so I’m going to close it. If you still need help with this please either start a new thread or email support@glowforge.com.

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#11