Hello all, I’m coming from RDCAM on the big nameless eBay laser, and starting with a K40 and LaserWeb. I make small runs of keychains, usually by importing a .jpg for raster artwork and a .dxf for cutting. I get these two positioned relative to each other, and then use RDCAM’s array copy tool to lay out several for cutting at once. Is this possible with LaserWeb?
At the moment you must do this outside LaserWeb4.
Expanding on @Ariel_Yahni_UniKpty 's answer. You could import the .dxf and .jpg into Inkscape (use version 0.91.x, not 0.92.x), align them, array them, and save as .svg. LW will then pick that up.
Future feature request?
@Todd_Fleming I’m playing with exactly that, aligning and arraying dxfs and jpgs. I can find no tool that says “array.” There’s a “create tiled clones” but if I do that, only one of the clones is brought into Laserweb. Do you know something I don’t?
How much will it cost to get an array copy/paste function in LaserWeb?
The fact that it’s so hard to say “These two shapes, arranged like this, now 50 copies of this assembly in a grid” is simply embarrassing.
How’s it embarrassing? No matter how much we add to LW, there will always be something missing that someone needs. Right now we’re trying to figure out a really nasty problem: the ton of new features over the past couple months turned a carefully-designed UI into a confusing mess. Once we solve that we’re probably going to have to cut down on accepting new requests to prevent a repeat.
It’s not embarrassing at the laserweb level, it’s embarrassing at the open source software as a whole level. I’ve got four open source CAD packages, three open source graphic arts packages, none of which have an obvious and effective way of doing what I need to do, which isn’t that complicated. I need to align a jpg with a dxf, then make a grid of copies of that thing. QCAD will do that internally just fine, but when exported/imported into LW, the jpgs are gone. Also, because the versions of DXF don’t match up, it won’t do ellipses. So I have to walk it through LibreCAD. Once again, LibreCAD can draw what I want it to draw, but the jpgs don’t make it from LibreCAD into LW. Inkscape can maybe do it, but not using the array copy command, because if you do that it screws up the layer structure, so that when you bring it into LW you have to manually select the individual components. Or you might be able to copy/paste manually 50 times and arrange them into a grid. GIMP and Pinta are no help creating a grid of jpgs…Truly the least labor intensive way to get it done is the repositioning macros and just pushing the “run job” button for every individual copy.
@Adam_Bowers have you tried this http://www.chrishilbig.com/inkscape-experiments-step-and-repeat/
Yes. It’s a lot of work. It won’t clone two objects at once, you have to group them into one object. Then the clones are “linked,” so you have to unlink them. For some stupid reason, it puts a clone on top of the original, so you have to delete that. Then you have to ungroup everything and manually select all the parts to put into different layers so they can be brought into LW in such a way that all the vectors go in one operation and all the rasters go in another.
I think it also pulls the layer structure out of the DXF. One thing that impressed me about laserweb was that it works with DXF layers.