making file for laser cutter (pdf)

[spikey]

oeps, i read you post to late. anyway, i kinda allready nested it myself. had to spread it over two pieces of board anyway so pleanty of space.
fundled a little in inkscape and got it all where i wanted it.

when i just tried all the arc's flipped any way in svgnest all the arcs flipped so. no good. too late now anyway.
all the files are now reduced to pdf's so doubtfull that the flipped arc problem pops up in the lasercutter.

hope tings will work tomorrow.
I'll let you know.

Kind greats Matthieu

[saso]

here are the example results from svgnest, basically it is just automatic placement... only thing i have some concern with it is the part size, not sure if they are of the original size

anyway, for me it is good that i was able to found out how to make svg exported parts from freecad behave better, will write more details about it tomorrow for all the others, i am way over bed time today

if you will have some problems, abc.svg is sort of "the cleanest" set and should IMO work best...

[spikey]

hmmm part size.. is for me kinda of the upmost importance for this one.

so i'll just keep it as it is now.

i'll look at your files tomorrow, it's nearly 5 in the morning here now so. sleepy time.

thnks again

[saso]

ok, so here is a quick description of what i did in inkscape to sort of clean up this shapes and make them behave better, since i belive this can be useful to all the users and for different cases not just laser cutting...

- select all of the shapes and ungroup them, so you have no more groups
- keep everything selected and chose "object to path" from the path menu
- chose "edit paths by nodes" tool from the toolbox toolbar and select everything twice, first selection will show up the nodes, second will select the nodes
- chose "join selected nodes" from the edit nodes toolbar menu
- for objects that have a single shape this should be it, for those that have cutouts (holes), select all the shapes of the single object and use the "exclusion" tool from the path menu to create the clean single shape of it

this should give you nice clean shapes that should behave well in what ever way or tool they are used for. in the image below we can see the difference between a nice clean shape (on the right) and the shape directly exported from freecad (on the left) when you simply select the shape and click on one of the colors to set the fill ("hatch") color

[NormandC]

Hello Matthieu,

1. You realize that your forum username is your email address? This is part of your personal info and should never be put in clear online. In these days that big companies farm our personal data and try to establish detailed profiles of us, you should not make their job easier...
2. How come no forum administrator has contacted you about this? They should have offered you to change it to something more neutral, that's what I would have done when I was forum admin.
3. I highly recommend you contact Yorik by private message and ask to change your username to something else that is not your email address.

As for the current topic, are you absolutely sure that the fablab's laser cutter requires PDF files? I find this highly irregular. PDF's basic purpose is for print. It scales the original document to a set paper size. And that's the operative word: scaling! Something you definitely do not want here. You want your design's original size. A laser cutter should not use such a format. Commercial laser cutters all use DXF (a 2D CAD format which FreeCAD exports), AFAIK consumer laser cutters use a vector graphics format like SVG or AI (Illustrator), or EPS... So may I suggest you check again with the fablab? This would make things much, much simpler if you didn't have to deal with PDF.

[microelly2]

As for the current topic, are you absolutely sure that the fablab's laser cutter requires PDF files? I find this highly irregular. PDF's basic purpose is for print. It scales the original document to a set paper size. And that's the operative word: scaling! Something you definitely do not want here. You want your design's original size. A laser cutter should not use such a format. Commercial laser cutters all use DXF (a 2D CAD format which FreeCAD exports), AFAIK consumer laser cutters use a vector graphics format like SVG or AI (Illustrator), or EPS... So may I suggest you check again with the fablab? This would make things much, much simpler if you didn't have to deal with PDF.

It's really possible. I was surprised too, but I have seen this last year. There are laser cutter which accept PDF.
And I used PDF to print out the drawings in right size on some special printers. It is sometime easier to handle than svg.

[spikey]

@normandC, thanks for your username advice. this was unintended..! but at the end, this email adres i use is like specially used for stuff like this. it's not a email adres i use anymore, and functions as a mailbox for junk, as extra spam filter. all the important stuff gets send trough to my legit emailadres. they can spam me on there as much as the like without me bing hassled. but just to be save.. i have contacted Yorik so it will be solved.

about the .pdf format, yeah i'm rather sure. but i'll check again.. maybe there is a 2e format.
anywy. i have the files ready in both .svg and .pdf all setup to the correct size for the wood sheet as was requested so i doubt that although indeed possible any rescaling will happen. but as said. i have both .svg and .pdf. just hope when i would use .svg i have no problems with the flipping arcs.

kind regards

[jmaustpc]

How come no forum administrator has contacted you about this?

They did, I was giving him a chance to login and get my PM telling him his new user name so that he could log back in again...before I changed it. In the end he suggested "spikey" so I changed it .....and I see it worked. Its the first time I have ever changed a user name, I actually wasn't sure if the PHPBB would allow that as I thought it might be a critically important database key to identify the account.....but it would seem not as it updated seamlessly.

[spikey]

@ saso,

late response but.. busy days.. been doing a lot and felt like i had it finished but felt like i needed to check your tutorial out. just to make sure.
so i implemented it.

i'll added the file.

i do notice that when i fill in, the fill in doesn't tough the edges. there is like a a bit of white between my red and my line. now i don't care about that. i don't need the red. just feel that there might be a problem with that drawing wise. there is no difference before and after your adaptation though besides the fact that the pil logo lines a more black insteds of grey. i'll add the other one too.

the one "to engrave" is ment as to engrave a line. nut cut through. so there is a line but it doesn't drop out. this way i have the full logo without the need to suspend anything.

grtz Matthieu

[spikey]

thanks jmaustpc and NormandC for this!

and sorry about the hassle, one moment of not paying attention and one sees what happens.

but thank you for your alertness and help.

and ps: i just hadn't noticed the pm yet as i just logged in.