Why does my Glowforge suddenly hate lower case d’s?

#1

I cut a lot of script text. Like, a LOT. My design process is always the same. Same font, connect letters as needed, weld together in Affinity Designer & export to SVG the same way each time, and each cut is just vector, full bed width.

Twice now I’ve seen the glitch in the photo below in a lower case d. Fortunately it was just on MDF that I’m buying locally by the 4x8 sheet. So it was cheap enough of a glitch and I have tons of MDF, but if it had happened on my last piece of a mirrored or glitter sheet for something that needs to get out to a customer, I’d be super annoyed.

The first time it happened, I re-ran the same file as a score (shrank it down first to reduce waste) and it looked correct. Then ran that same reduced size as a cut and it was still fine. (reduced in GFUI from full width to ~4”) So I figured it was a one time thing and tried cutting it full size and it glitched again. I made a new SVG and it was fine. A day later I ran a completely different job and it happened again on another d, so I just made a new SVG and it worked.

I could see it being a bad SVG, but if that was the case why would the score or a smaller sized cut work fine?

Here is the glitch:

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EBBDE85E-9414-4456-9D8A-5AC1530D8A39.jpeg866×1154 301 KB

Here is how it looked after both the reduced size score & cut. I think this pic is the cut:

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7EC040AD-9E3A-4EE9-8F11-098C1B711FAC.jpeg866×1154 243 KB

#2

Because when you scale floating point numbers they can lose precision. A tiny gap in a path can close up. It could be a bug in the GFUI but must likely a tiny defect in your SVG such as breaks in the path or nodes very close together or overlapping.

#3

But that’s the thing. The original version wasn’t scaled much at all. Minimal scaling in Designer, and then minimal scaling in the GFUI to fit to the sheet. But doing it this way is no different than how I’ve done dozens others exactly the same way without ever seeing this happen before.

There were no gaps in the path or weird overlapping nodes as this was just text converted to curves. Plus I did look closely when I re-made the SVG - the area of the d’s have like 4 nodes - it’s nothing crazy, and extremely minimal compared to other letters.

#4

Might help to share the file here that you had problems with. The problem is more than likely either the file or the way it’s interpreted and neither can be diagnosed without the file contents really. Additionally, the GF staff can look at additional particulars if you give them a date and time (with your time zone) of the cut.

3 Likes
#5

I’d post the file but I got it working since then. If it happens again I’ll have to save as a v2 in order to preserve the weirdness.

The first time it happened was either Thurs night or sometime Sat, second time was Sun. That’s as detailed as I can get there though. Haha!

#6

Thanks for letting us know about this. I’m glad you resolved it, but if you run into the issue again please feel free to start a new topic and attach the file that’s producing those results - we’d like to take a closer look. Happy printing!

#7