What order does it cut lines of the same color?

I understand the order of engraves or cuts relating to different colors but how does it process operations of the same color? Today I was making a living hinge from Proofgrade maple veneer and it caught fire in a bunch of spots, I even changed the default speed from 290 to 310 because I had a feeling it would happen. My idea is to make alternate lines the same color and in between those a 2nd color so it has time to cool a bit. If I knew how it arranged lines, I could make it cut tightly packed lines in this order and direction to reduce flare ups (ignore dots, can’t make leading spaces):
1 ------------> . 3-------------> . 2------------->
. . . . . . . 7<------------ . 8<--------------
4-------------> . 6-------------> . 5------------->
I draw in Autocad, then dxfout to Inkscape, who knows how the conversions arrange entities, I watch it make a hinge and it does groups of lines side by side in one direction, then move to the other end and maybe cut in the opposite direction. I really would like it to choose the most efficient path to make the quickest job done, except when I want to force it to scatter so as to not torch up.
I’m going to lay out a drawing and then draw some lines in a certain direction and copy a set like how I texted above and see if it follows it, earlier I was mirroring sets of lines, copying sets, it probably made a chaotic list that the user can’t see. I hope someday GF will put options in the GFUI like: “run from left to right, top to bottom”, or “run exactly as drawn” etc so we can have more control. I know, picky picky :slight_smile: Thanks!

Might not help. What feeds the fire is the oxygen coming in from the slits that are already there, and veneer is pretty thin. :neutral_face:

For something like veneer, you might be able to spread the lines a little farther apart - veneer is pretty flexible anyway if you orient your cut in the correct direction…you want it to roll with the grain. (And wetting it makes it pretty flexible without the hinge.)

You can’t control the pathing (aside from the overall sense of using color) but you can control the line direction. Every SVG has a start point and end point. There should be a Reverse Path Direction somewhere in Inkscape (Illustrator has it at least) that you can use to change the path direction.

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Does Inkscape have a display toggle to show the directions so you can see lines that are going the opposite way? I couldn’t find a display except while editing a single entity. Otherwise it would be like flipping over a few pennies and having someone tell you, “now you have 73 correct and 56 wrong”, might take a few days to get a design correct that way. Moot point now, I found a better way, I’ll post in a different part of this thread.
Thanks though, it’s a good idea and I can use it for for long paths if I forget to go the right way in my source file.

Actually you can, I finally did a controlled test. I drew a line from top to bottom, copied it across to the right, one by one to 20, copied the 20 lines as a group to the right to 80. The laser cut from bottom to top, right to left, the exact reverse of how they were created, even the groups were treated as though they were copied individually, this is good, control! I changed defaults from Speed 290, Power 100 to Speed 320, Power 80 and by using a different color for each row of parallel lines, like typing a row of I’s on a typewriter then hitting return, it didn’t overheat and came out perfect! I realize most people don’t have Autocad but I suspect any vector based program stores entities linearly.
R.L. Hamm

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What I do in Illustrator is go to the Stroke panel and there is an option to Add Arrowheads either at the beginning or the end of a path. When you add the arrowhead to either end, it’s very easy to see which direction the path goes.

Here’s a post that I made on it a while back:

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Thank you @rhgrafix for that information! I’m glad to see you resolved the problem, and I’m going to close this thread. If you still need help with this please either start a new thread or email support@glowforge.com.

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