Question regarding LW3 vs LW4 SVG import. When I import my SVG into LW4 it seems as though the resolution is reduced significantly compared to LW3. If you look at the paths for the letters in the attached image, LW3 clearly has much more definition. The gcode reflects this as well. Curved paths are my issue right now. When I engrave this the letters look very “blocky”. Please help! THANKS!
Link to file in question: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3A9wmWsyWK1bTNVWW9LTTFJNVU
LW4’s laser CAM limits path segments to .5mm to stop Smoothie from stuttering at high speed. I planned to make this adjustable, but never got around to it.
I opened this file with LaserWeb4 & see what you mean. It is quite jagged on the lettering.
I then opened the file in Inkscape & had a look. Everything looks smooth in there.
I then opened the file in Adobe Illustrator & had a look. Again, everything looks smooth in there.
From AI I saved a copy as an SVG. Loaded this into LW4 & voila, it looks perfectly smooth in LW4.
Must be a file issue…
See AI saved version: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bzi2h1k_udXwN1dSekN2WXNqY1k/view?usp=sharing
In case it makes any difference, these are my SVG Options that I have set in AI when I saved a copy.
Screenshot of the Heart new AI.svg version imported into LW4. Looks a lot smoother than the screenshot you shared, however upon closer inspection it is not perfectly smooth.
@Todd_Fleming Thanks for the insight. @Yuusuf_Sallahuddin_Y Thanks for taking a look at the file. I wonder what the issue is with Inkskape SVG as it looks fine in LW4 as you say now. Maybe a combo of the .5mm segments Todd mentioned? I appreciate the help with this.
Do you know if Inkscape break arcs? I know In SketchUp you need to specify how many segments or resolution before creating the arc or circle
Inkscape keeps arcs. LW’s SVG importer converts arcs to lines. Ignore what I said about 0.5mm; that happens at gcode generation.
@Todd_Fleming I tried converting my arcs to lines in Inkscape but it did not make a difference when I imported to LW.
@Arion_McCartney I’ve just played around with the file in Inkscape to see if there was any settings or anything that I could find that may fix this issue.
Settings wise, nothing seemed to make a difference.
However, I did a test of selecting the paths for “O n e” & then I performed a Union operation on these paths. Saved as SVG again & imported to LW4. Looks much smoother than the original for some reason…
See results here:
& For a final test, I’ve just selected the “O” & performed a Union on it alone.
See screenshot:
Note, for some reason the “e” in “One” is missing in the viewport, but it is able to be selected in LW4 if I click that area or use the tree…
@Yuusuf_Sallahuddin_Y Looks like that did the trick! Thank you again for looking into this. I tried a union operation on the big E below the text and it smoothed it out perfectly as well. THANKS!!
@Arion_McCartney Looks like whatever Inkscape is doing when it does a Union it is fixing whatever was done when Inkscape converted Text to Paths (I assume you did that at some point?). Would be interesting to know what exactly is going on in Inkscape. Trial & error nonsense like this isn’t very helpful when we don’t know what exactly is the issue.
@Yuusuf_Sallahuddin_Y Yes, I did the Object to Path operation on the words. Agreed, would like to know what Inkscape is doing to cause this. It was pretty frustrating for me at first because I did not notice it until I started feeding gcode to the laser. Right away I noticed the letters were very “low res”/not smooth like they should be. Thanks again for the help. I opened this is AI and saved as SVG with your settings, but when imported to LW4 the text is way off from where it should be. Did this happen to you? I assume that is an easy fix. Seems like the coordinates for the text are off. Thanks.
@Arion_McCartney When I imported the AI SVG I had the same thing as when I imported the Inkscape SVG. It basically appeared with the entire document at -150 (or similar) on the Y axis. Other than that, the paths for the text all looked to be in the correct positions.
Might be something somewhere else in my AI preferences that is causing the positioning data to be stored differently on my end as opposed to yours.
edit: Seems I cannot find anything relevant in any other settings within AI, so no idea what or why yours positioned the paths for the text incorrectly…
@Yuusuf_Sallahuddin_Y and I also have the same issue you do with some of the letters not appearing on the workplane in lw4. Not sure what causes that. But I can click on it and it’s still there, just not visible
There are two issues:
Jagged fixed by Inkscape’s union: the original has quadratic bezier curves. Inkscape’s union turns it into cubic beziers. lw.svg-parser is doing a better job with cubics than it does with quadratics.
Missing in viewport: some shapes hit a limitation in the poly2tri library. This one’s tricky; every triangulation library I’ve tried hits issues, they just vary with which conditions cause them to fail.
@Todd_Fleming interesting and good to know! Thanks
After Todd’s explanation of what was going on with the quadratic vs cubic beziers in Inkscape, I realised I have no idea what that means haha.
So, a bit of googling & I found an awesome (& interactive) explanation of quadratic & cubic beziers, with a hell of a lot of maths in there to explain the whole process.
If anyone is interested, have a read here: https://pomax.github.io/bezierinfo/