Troubleshooting an SVG file

I have it reversed on the original files, these are my “work arounds” to see if I can get it to work. Hence the name temp.svg. :slight_smile:

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Looks like the upshot of the incredibly long discussion we had before was to rasterize the image and convert it to a bitmap for engraving. That should be easy enough to do.

So, I got it to work. Using Inkscape, I clicked the bee and text and I had gotten an ‘undefined’ in stroke color. I selected a color, Black, and now it works.

temp

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hmmm…I did that (I think) in CorelDraw and got the same results. I used a hairline stroke (black). Still works for cut, but the Sav is gone for engrave.

That is odd. So when I uploaded for my GForge, I showed all the letters fully defined. Thinking I had it, I was like YEAH! and posted. I didn’t realize it wasn’t set for etch. Select for etch, and the SAV disappears. How strange.

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WOOHOO!!! I got it to work! I rasterizezd it in PSP and then saved and imported as a JPG instead of BMP but still did BMP tracing to convert to SVG. Not sure why that worked and saving as BMP didn’t but now I know.
Thanks for your help @karzdan and @Jules.

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I’m on my first cup of coffee this AM, so forgive me in advance. With that warning out of the way: most of the time something like this, where you have one big solid engraving and just a cut line, it will be easier to convert the engraved area to a raster before heading to the UI. This way you’ll basically get a WYSIWIG; the UI’s RIP software is going to rasterize it for engraving purposes anyways.

When I opened the file in Illustrator, I had one big compound path that had the background and text all combined. It didn’t appear that the text had been “knocked out” of the background. Since I saw you got it working, I didn’t go through the steps of knocking the text paths out.

Edit: I see where you said you imported it into the design software as a bitmap, then retraced, etc. You can embed raster images into a SVG; SVG’s don’t need to be pure vector graphics. Just make sure you have “embed images” selected in your export/Save As options rather than linked.

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This is a big workflow challenge to adapt to. Thanks for posting.

When doing relief engraving with a background engraved and the text and graphic proud of the surface and untreated, it seems we are unable to avoid having a two step process. If you want the graphic and text to be editable, you’ll have to keep them as separate objects and not a compound path. Then you either, do a boolean and punch out the negative space in the background and bring that pure SVG into the GFUI, or you export it as a bitmap and bring that into the GFUI. I wrestled with this workflow when doing the sewer-cover top plate for my exhaust port plug. I like staying with a pure SVG to have more options with positioning, especially for rotating, and resizing. The easiest is saving the design file with separate objects that you can edit as paths for later use, but then export as a bitmap. Keeping it a vector allows minimally more functionality, especially if you have different colors in the SVG for the different depths. You can do that with different shades of gray for your objects engraved and then the bitmap can be used with gray scaling. Can’t do that with gradient fills of closed path objects.

Doing the cover plate file was very frustrating figuring all these things out. Once I realized that I had to keep a master all vector SVG and keep my edits on there but always have to export a different file either pure vector or raster. I’d make the file and upload and found that something was wrong, then I had to go back to an original file and fix it. Often I had made changes already to the saved file that made me have to redo the text from scratch.

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Is the blurriness of the bed in the photos typical of all machines? It seems pretty excessive.

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Her Glowforge is offline.

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It gets blurry when offline?

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I believe it gets blurry becasue the camera isn’t being told what height to focus at.

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You’d think that wouldn’t matter since it’s not a live preview of the bed; it’s whatever last image was stored. Maybe they blur the last image as a visual indicator of hey, your Glowforge is off. Who knows - just speculating. But it seems they blur it intentionally.

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The problem with the file was the path direction of the nodes in the SAVE part. (It’s the problem we discovered in the link Jules posted and you can read about the issue at length there.) The GUI does not always handle the Corel SVGs properly and it really should be fixed. Good news is it can be easily fixed when you know what the issue is. I use Corel almost exclusively and don’t really have the SVG issue anymore now that I have my workflow down.

I’ll post the fix so you can see it. It worked when I uploaded it, so hopefully it does that way for everyone else too. :slight_smile: All I did was select the nodes of the problem SAVE, right clicked and “reverse subpath” and then resaved as SVG. (I also couldn’t help but fix the cattywhompass scalloped nodes in the “e” of Save.) Pretty file BTW, show us the final product when you’re done!

bee

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I’ve seen people say they’ve had compression artifacts show up in the engrave when they use JPG files. If you’re retracing the file, the compression artifacts can cause problems there too. In either case (rasterizing to send to the GFUI or rasterizing to then retrace) PNG should work better than JPG. Then again, BMP also should have worked, even though it looks like it didn’t.

I think rasterizing and sending to the laser is a valid workaround*, or at least it should be, but if the Glowforge doesn’t engrave vectors and rasters the same way, it really isn’t.

Does the Glowforge still treat raster black (RGB 0,0,0) differently than vector black (RGB 0,0,0)?

*even though it IS a kludge and creates an extra file that shouldn’t be necessary, as pointed out by @marmak3261
*even though “you’ll get better image quality leaving it as a vector”

Yes, the blur is a special effect to tell you the image is not usable.

Yeah it’s the pathing direction problem. SVGs allow two different winding methods but the GFUI only handles one. They’re not truly SVG standard compliant.

I ran into this a week or so ago helping @davidgal2 on something he was doing. The reverse subpath didn’t work so I had to do another workaround. But it’s a good one to start with. Drives me nuts :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thanks for posting this. I’m so glad you were able to print your stamp!

I’ll look into the feedback about CorelDRAW SVG files.

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