Hello - I do a lot of paper scoring, and I’ve been playing with the previously discussed option of engraving fine score lines (vs using the “Score” function) so I don’t get end-of-line burn-through.
This worked fine for me, but lately I seem to be having problems where my loaded design (two layers, one for engraving/scoring, the other to cut the final outline) chokes when I switch the “engrave” layer from it’s default “cut” mode to “engrave”.
When I do so, the pattern vanishes and I end up with only the outer boundary cut layer.
What am I doing wrong here? I don’t understand why this is happening; they are 1pt lines, which it never complained about previously. If I leave it as cut or score the operation works fine on that layer, it’s only the engrave option. Confused here…
I’m having a hard time understanding the work flow. You can’t just convert a series of vector lines like the darts and kites into an engrave that would only engrave the lines as a raster. It might be choking on the number of nodes in that particular design.
It previously would take a vector line input and do an engrave on it- I just did a bunch of them last week… I understand what you’re saying but I don’t know how it did it before? It worked quite well for my purposes.
Maybe you did Stroke to Path or whatever the equivalent is in your editor? And then all of the sudden you have the same thing that is all fills instead of strokes.
I also experienced similar things yesterday. Things I have used in the past all of a sudden no longer worked. Is it possible that a coffee changed occurred and is messing things up?
I also had many of my prints just not print after they processed. Instead of the nice box that shows how long the print will take, the screen just returns to the images of the bed. It made me sad.
Hah, sadly this is my own fault as I forgot what I had done previously.
In Illustrator (only app I use) I had taken my engrave layer and rasterized it, so it converted my 1pt lines into a raster image… which engraves fine. I’ll just have to do that again.
I use a universal laser elsewhere with illustrator plugins so I forget about the Save-As-SVG step with the GF, sometimes.
All of this is because the vector Score function is impractical for use with paper right now as it blasts holes through the end of any line it scores, otherwise it makes truly excellent score lines on the paper I use for folding.
anyway thanks for the feedback, it was indeed my mistake, and the interface is behaving as it should. I just forgot a step.
Have you tried using multiple, low-powered score passes? It reduces the impact of the 'too much power in corners" problem, and is still faster than an engrave?
for scoring paper, even a score setting of 1000/1 ends up blasting through at the beginning/end of the score stroke. It’s the bit where the laser head is starting to move or slowing down; they need to be able to either reduce power more at this point, or something. I am hoping they will refine the stepper motor movement functions down the road to avoid this, as the other production lasers I use of similar strength do not have this problem (or at least as badly as the GF does).
doing engraves is a horrible solution to this problem but for the time being it’s the only option.
I should also clarify I’m using fairly heavy 110gsm bookbinding paper for this, not flimsy stuff, but it still blasts holes through and chars a bit on the lightest of score settings.
