I searched and read a bit and couldn’t find anything my brain understood… 
What logic does the Glowforge follow when it cuts duplicated items? For example, here is 6 of the same shape that I put into one SVG (not duplicated from the UI).
As you may be able to see in this screen shot, it seems to be cutting the insides of some letters and part of the outlines of others.
There has to be a logic, but it is escaping me. Can anyone lend me their brain for a bit?
There is a thread in here somewhere that has the sequence list if it is via color. (not sure anyone can tell you left right up down or whatever if all same color).
I have it as a personal palette.
Listed as follows:
Black
Dark Blue
Dark Green
Navy Blue
Bright Green
Aqua Blue
Brown
Purple
Lime Green
Red
Magenta
Orange
Yellow
C75 M68 Y65 K90
If someone doesn’t pop in with a link, I can drill down and locate the exact hex codes for you.
As for copies of a copy and ordered burn after that? Code logic I imagine. (fancy talk for dunno)
If they are all one color in the design file and one operation, I have yet to decipher why certain bits get cut out of what seems logical order. My tests never revealed anything.
Here is the boss’s take:
Thanks! In this case it’s all one color and a single file.
It’s boggled my mind too! I can’t figure out the logic, but I know it must exist. It seems to move all over the workspace quite inefficiently oftentimes.
That topic I linked with Dans reply has some good speculation as to why.
Maybe a sort by hex color codes
I googled hex values for colors
The best is cut inside to out. My plotter software automatically orders the cuts that is best for the integrity of the medium. I don’t understand why the Glowforge doesn’t do that
Googled
svg file format
went to wikipedia article and found #22ff00 under the color section as an example, if you sort by that number you would use it as a cutting order.
Color
Colors can be applied to all visible SVG elements, either directly or via fill , stroke , and other properties. Colors are specified in the same way as in CSS2, i.e. using names like black or blue , in hexadecimal such as #2f0 or #22ff00 , in decimal like rgb(255,255,127) , or as percentages of the form rgb(100%,100%,50%) .[32]
Black would be 000000 and the other end of the list above (yellow) would be FFFF00
orange is FFA500 which would go after black but before yellow
sort by hex value and it matches up nicely 
I think someone is going to have to do a bunch of cuts with tons on colors and see how it matches up. Or get one of their programmers to pipe up :-D, Python rocks!!! Java sucks!! (there, that will get a programmer’s reaction 
)
While nerdy-interesting, since my project was all one color, the color codes wouldn’t apply in this case. (I dig the info, though!)
I think since its all one color it calculates fastest cut times and cuts the fastest available paths (thats just a guess of mine though, seems to be that everything is calculated based on top speed possible to make print time less. Thats why some insides and some out sides all out of what would be normal orders we would think would be normal. This is just from what I noticed in all of my projects over time), if you want specific order make all different colors then order manually. I do this with my inside cuts are purple, scores are light blue, and outer cuts are red. Then I put them in that order so i know it will cut that way.
Doh! Must have not have had enough coffee sorry 
Completely beats me! I programmed the living hinge creator for optimised paths. Works perfectly and saves up to 20% of the cut time. Sometimes…
Other times Gf goes all over the place cutting backwards and forwards and jumping about.
It’s all good! I really appreciate the reply and thinking it through together. I always come out better because of it.
It would be really handy if this was documented. I spend a lot of time reordering layers in the GF UI that could be avoided if I could tell what order they were going to end up in in advance. On a related note, is there any way to put cut/score/engrave settings in the file in advance so they don’t have to be done by hand (and possibly incorrectly) in the UI?
Strokes will be automatically identified as cuts (and have to be manually changed to scores). Fills will be automatically identified as engraves.
But no - not a way, that I’ve seen or anyone has discovered, to automatically set up a score. GF does it with catalog files, but I suspect that it involves adding in additional info with a text editor to the SVG files.
Everybody knows that unless they just got their Glowforge today and haven’t read the manual. I asked about cut/score/engrave settings. As it stands now, I have to redo the settings by hand every time I bring a file in. I have some pretty complex files and it is easy to forget something. If anybody else has discovered some secret feature that does this, it would be great to know. No text editing would be necessary — you can name elements in Adobe Illustrator and I’ll bet you can in Inkscape and other programs. too. Here’s a file I created in under a minute. See the id= parameters on the elements and groups.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- Generator: Adobe Illustrator 16.0.4, SVG Export Plug-In . SVG Version: 6.00 Build 0) -->
<!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/1.1/DTD/svg11.dtd">
<svg version="1.1" id="Layer_1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" x="0px" y="0px"
width="250px" height="250px" viewBox="0 0 250 250" enable-background="new 0 0 250 250" xml:space="preserve">
<rect id="cut-400-Full-340" x="15" y="15" fill="#FFFFFF" stroke="#231F20" stroke-width="1.0385" stroke-miterlimit="10" width="220" height="220"/>
<g id="score-1000-100-270">
<circle id="b" fill="#FFFFFF" stroke="#1DFF58" stroke-width="0.7598" stroke-miterlimit="10" cx="75" cy="82.115" r="50"/>
<circle id="a" fill="#FFFFFF" stroke="#1DFF58" stroke-width="0.6961" stroke-miterlimit="10" cx="175" cy="167.885" r="50"/>
</g>
<g>
<circle id="engrave-500-50-340_1_" fill="#FF00FF" stroke="#FFFFFF" stroke-width="1.0385" stroke-miterlimit="10" cx="75" cy="175" r="18.5"/>
<circle id="engrave-500-50-340_2_" fill="#FF00FF" stroke="#FFFFFF" stroke-width="1.0385" stroke-miterlimit="10" cx="175" cy="75" r="18.5"/>
</g>
</svg>
I’m sure this is already on the suggestion list. Would be nice to see it sooner rather than later.
On the other question, any @glowforge people want to let us know if there is any official documentation on whether there is an ordering by color and, if so, what that ordering is?