Inkscape for Glowforge Users- The Very Basics and Understanding Text

hello Luke porch users and other laser users this is Inkscape percolo for its users but this isn't just specifically for glowforge I think that these are great tutorials for any Inkscape user that would be using a laser so um today we're going to go over some of the very basic setting escapes so if you feel pretty confident with Inkscape already this may not be the video for you but I love love love having you in this group because it will be so valuable for you to answer all of these different like help answer questions and help mentor other users with fur guards tank escape a few things about escape is if you're not sure what Inkscape is an escape is a vector graphics software it provides in produces SVG's which are really great for using on the glowforge or using on like a cricket or a silhouette machine so Inkscape is free which I love because a lot of people think you need illustrator to do all these really cool designs and you don't you can use Inkscape which is what I use pretty much exclusively and I've gotten decently good at understanding what Inkscape is so if you are interested in getting a glowforge and want to learn some design things this could be for you if you purchase a lot of your files and you want to learn how to make your own this can be for you or if you just want to freshen up on some of your skills and maybe learn a little thing or two here and there this also could be for you so we're gonna be doing tutorials at least twice a week for the entire summer but always feel free to add answer ask or answer any questions in the glowforge group because I really want to make this a good dialogue for everyone if you are interested in purchasing this purchasing a glowforge I do have my code listed in the description but if someone else helps you in this group please reach out to them and ask for their code as well because that would be a great way to really kind of help the people that have helped you okay so um let's go through some of the basics of a scape so if you download you can actually go to Inkscape Tao to work I believe that's what it is and you can download it for free super easy usually pretty quick let's go through some of the basics of being scape you have your file up here edit few layer I haven't used layering too much but we'll go through that somewhat that's one of the big features in Adobe Illustrator because I've used that a little bit but I definitely know Inkscape better object this is something I use a lot but path is the thing that I seem to use the most so we'll go through and in these videos we're going to be talking about some popular projects that people do make with Inkscape and how to make them yourself too we have text and filters and all these other things extensions we will get to as well because this is an extension you can make to make laser-cut boxes and if you've ever seen like Libyan hinges you can make those in Inkscape as well which is awesome so but stays we're just gonna get started with some basics so this is the icon the little pointer key right here that you're always gonna want to come back to so you're gonna click some of these other things so let's say you click the box and you make a box awesome but you can't just go and click something else because you'll make another box so you'll always want to go back to your pointer and that way you can actually click and manipulate that in some way and move it and things like that okay so we'll get rid of the box obviously you can create a circle and these are typically filled but I've turned off my fill so you can fill it in different colors that could be useful for other different reasons we have other shapes that you can create so I've already kind of preset that one for a different project we have 3d shapes that are fun to kind of create for different things [Music] spirals this could be a cool design and you can say how many loops and turns and all those other things that you want to create this is also something that might be fun to create bowls which we'll get to in a different day as well so then we have you can create straight lines or all of these other things if you're not really super confident about your line making skills again always come back to this if you want to manipulate that in any way pencil pencil is like when you basically would draw freehand now that does actually look to look better than what I actually just drew for you because of the smoothing feature which I will talk about a little bit later in a different video with you guys so we'll get rid of these sorry my computer I just got it so it's been updating a lot then we have our calligraphy feature and again if you a touchscreen this is even better I would use the fill on this but it's kind of cool because it has the different gradients and things like that but today what we are going to focus on is text so a lot of times people want to use text in glowforge but I'll show you guys the common misunderstanding for using text and glowforge so we'll just set it to any of these texts and one of the other things that's super cool is you can actually download text onto your Inkscape which again will go over in a different video so all those super cool fonts that you see will go through to websites that you can find those fonts with but let's just go with the basic Arial for now and I'm going to type my name normally so typically you would think okay my name cool resize it so a few things with resizing before we talk about a common misunderstanding is you would probably think hey I'll use this corner I'll pull it out and it'll just resize it properly right well as you can see I tried and my name already got distorted so ctrl Z makes it go back but so if you want to drag out the corner and you don't want it to get distorted hold down the ctrl key click your mouse and drag and then you can actually change it without it distorting the shape so even if you like it like this and you want it to become bigger in that way hold down the ctrl key okay so let's say I'm satisfied with that Oh before we get to that - if you click the first time it'll show you all those different areas going out if you click the second time it'll show you arrows going horizontally and then a little loop right here that means that you can actually rotate it in this way which is pretty fun so however okay so let's say that's the way that I would want my design perfect you would typically think okay hits say bass awesome I'll do wrinkle too cool and then you would think hey let's go into the glowforge app and then in the glowforge app if you're not familiar with this go to the plus hit the upload find your design and you would open however something we didn't do with this you can see doesn't have any printable elements this has text it's been removed which is really frustrating when I first did this I was very very frustrated because I'm like what do you mean it doesn't have sex you're supposed to be able to do text in glowforge so let's go back and we'll fix this text so you can actually use it in the glowforge software so the biggest thing here and I love this feature is path and then you hit object to path you will use this with a lot of different things now something that I always do to check and make sure that it actually did what I wanted it to do is the second one under the icon clicker we have the second one and you can hover over these and you will see it highlights it in red and you'll actually see it highlights it in dots if you click on them directly which is great now as you can see my letters are all individual right now which could be fine but if I want this to really stay as one unit especially when you're resizing something you want to do is you want to group them and if you want to select all you can either hit control a or you can just what I always do is I just click and drag a box and then it highlights everything that I clicked and dragged the box over so what you want to do now is you want to go to path and then you want to hit combined and then again we'll go to this and you can see all of these are now in one which is pretty cool so again I'll hit file and I'll just hit save this time and that's Rachel too we'll go into glowforge this time we'll hit upload Rachel - and let's see if it actually works this time processing and there we go and now that you have this design you can resize it and glowforge you can do all these other things in glowforge and we can go through the glowforge interface if people have questions about that but it can engrave it can cut anakin score so now it has the ability to do all of these things that it did not have the ability to do before because of the fact that you use this particular trick in Inkscape so I hope that that video was helpful to you guys I know that some of you guys might be bored by this but for me personally when I was first starting out I struggle with this for weeks and so I just didn't want people to have that same experience where you are kind of struggling so if you have any questions about this particular tutorial let me know I will be creating others for other types of ideas and projects and things like that so I'll probably do a few more basic videos and then we'll get into some specific projects that you can do that will have even better features alright thank you everyone and invite anybody else to the group that you think that might be benefiting from this particular group thank you

Channel: Teacher&Maker

Views: 8,563

Keywords: Glowforge, Inkscape, Inkscape for Glowforge, SVG for Glowforge, Free Software for Glowforge, Inkscape for Beginners, Designing your own files for Glowforge, Vector Software for Glowforge, Laser Engraving Beginners

Id: BJMOuhzcFHQ

Length: 9min 58sec (598 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2020