Inkscape - How To Add a Name to Cut on a Glowforge Laser

in this video i'm going to show you how we take the floral border and we can move it around so it's big enough to put text in the middle and then we're going to bond it all together so that when you send the file the svg file to the glow forge or whatever laser you're using it will cut it out as if it's one big piece meant to be cut from one piece of wood now of course if you're making this bigger and you need to separate it in order to cut it because you don't have a big enough glowforge bed then you'll have to do some other things in order to cut this in that way but this is for when you're cutting one big piece from one piece of wood so i've opened the file it's already an svg file as if you had bought it from me or i have already converted it to an svg from the design the design was made in illustrator but i'm showing you in inkscape how to manipulate it and make it work so the first thing we're going to do is select the entire design on the artboard and i apologize in advance for the dogs running around in the background okay so what we do first is we're going to ungroup everything right now it's all grouped together in one big spot so we ungroup it by selecting on a pc shift control g and we do it a couple of times shift control g shift control g i'm using a mac so it's shift command g shift command g again you do it a couple of times because first it undoes the grouping between the two and then it'll undo all the grouping of the flowers and the cutouts and the details in the middle and then you just click on the outside of the design to clear it next we're going to draw a border box around one of the designs do the top one first again you see all the little dotted lines around all the little pieces that'll be cut out by the glowforge or the laser and what we're going to do is regroup this for the moment command g or control g will regroup it but you see it's separate from the bottom now and we're going to do the same thing to the bottom one to regroup it so that when we move it around a little bit it doesn't come apart and all those little pieces don't move so now i'll be able to move it up and down in order to put it in the place that i want it for my text so let's move it up just a little bit okay to line these up one of the neat tricks i like to use that works in inkscape but also they have the same exact thing in illustrator is if you go over to the side or the top for that matter but we're going to do it from the side right now and you take your cursor and put it right on the ruler on the side here and then you drag it over you'll see a red guideline pop up and you can put that anywhere you need it now i'm going to put it smack dab in the middle of these flowers i'm using the top one as guide right now and that is going to help me let me put the camera back down and you'll see that when i move these around if i move it up or down or to left or the right i will always be able to line it back up together by making sure that that guideline is directly in the middle of that center flower and that'll keep me positioned exactly right i'm gonna just use the arrows on my keyboard to move the top piece up a little bit it doesn't have to move a lot depends on the font you're going to use but i'm gonna just open that up a little bit wider now we're gonna pick a font and i recommend picking something that has letters that are all the same height yes it's a it's not as beautiful on a graphics level uh you know you won't have as many swatches or flourishes but it'll be much easier on a design level and a cut level if you have letters that are all going to touch the top and touch the bottom because we're going to weld it together to make sure that it stays together and hangs as one piece and i think that that's the ultimate goal here is to keep this all in one piece so let's pick um let's see what do i have on here we're gonna do oh black river that'll work because the uh the lower case of black river is actually all one size so let's do that here i believe i can do this draw in here [Music] and pick a name let's see what name should we use now i'm going to do all lowercase on this because it'll keep all the letters at the same height and that's going to help in putting this in the center oops grab the wrong thing remember uh shortcut on your keyboard anytime you do something wrong and just want to move it back is of course control z oh would you stop doing that clearly i'm not grabbing the text i'm grabbing the design now with the name like courtney it's pretty easy because there's four letters on each side doesn't mean it's exactly the same measurement on each side but you can start from there and then get close enough to make it work and then i like to put it in the center and start pulling it out to start to see what it looks like pull it out just like that going to center it up a little bit and the idea is to make sure that the tops of the letters are overlapping on the bottom part of the design and the same for the bottom parts of the letters i'm going to pull it out a little bit further remember we can always reposition the top and the bottom of the design i want to make it so that the word courtney is nicely centered leaving the about the same amount of space on this end bar on each side you can certainly pull it out larger and and have it be all the way on the bottom but remember that's going to continue to push your entire design up and make it bigger and wider and you don't want to get it to a point where it's too big to cut if you're trying to make this all in one piece which i assume you are at least that's what i'm going for today okay so we're gonna pick this top part and this is why i wanted to bond all of this together or group them because i don't want the little pieces the little cuts to move when i start to push this up a little bit okay i'm going to move it up just enough so that the letters are just inside the border some letters are going to be easier because they go higher like the c's and the o's anything rounded so you're gonna have to watch that they're all decently in there if you get it too close but not quite in there it won't work as well okay i think we just about have this now you're going to select your word your text and you want to come up to i believe now this is my very first time using escape i've never used this before i just downloaded it this afternoon in illustrator what we do with the word is you create outlines uh is what it's called in the text menu here we're taking this object to path and that has now taken it from being a text word into just individual objects and you'll see that when i ungroup it the other thing we want to do is take the color and remove the fill but add a stroke oops let's do this now is where you can tell there it is that uh it's my first time in this program so we've just removed the the color from it uh when you open the little box with the paint brush on the right hand side it gives you your color options and under fill i clicked x which means you're removing the color see if you can see this let me move the camera a little bit there we go i clicked the x to remove the fill then i clicked on stroke paint and clicked the box that fills it up and it's all black already so that'll work just fine okay now courtney as a word is still selected but it's no longer text and this is where you're going to find that out you go up to object let's see and ungroup and you'll see that the one word and the bounding box around it has now become eight individual bounding boxes because it's no longer joined and if i click off of it and just click on one letter as you can see it's become its own entity it's its own object so now that we've done that now this is a little tougher in inkscape than it is in illustrator uh it's a little bit different one of the things that we have to do now that we've got this set up exactly the way we want it we're going to join it all together we want to join the design to the letters to the other design let's start by joining the top design to the letters in inkscape the way we do that we have to go back remember earlier we joined all the little tiny cut pieces of the top design and the bottom design to each other to themselves we have to go back in i'm drawing the line around the top design oops it didn't take let's do that again there we go i've i've selected that top design and i'm going to ungroup it again okay we grouped it before oh first we ungrouped everything then we grouped it together now we're gonna ungroup it again so uh you can do keyboard shortcuts on a pc it's shift ctrl g and do it several times because you want to keep doing it until everything is ungrouped i do it three or four times just to make sure so i'm going to do the keyboard shortcut okay i did it twice it worked the other way to do this by the way is coming up under object after everything is selected you come to the object menu at the top sorry that uh this is a bad angle and you're gonna go in and ungroup okay that'll have the same effect as the keyboard shortcut okay we're gonna do the exact same thing at the bottom we're gonna draw the bounding box around the bottom design we'll go up to object and click ungroup and see everything all the little dotted lines popped up that tells me we've ungrouped everything now this part not tricky but you just have to make sure you've selected everything properly what you want to select on the top design and the bottom design is just clicking on this bottom bar when i click on that it's selecting the outer design it's not picking any of the little tiny inner ones because we've ungrouped them so they're not being selected it's just that bottom bar and that's all we want selected now then we're going to select along with that the c o u r t and e y so i hold down shift and i select each letter one at a time this is just the way i've found it to be easiest to make sure i know i'm selecting everything that i want i select them all and i let go of the shift key and then i'm going to come up into path the path menu drop down and i'm going to click union and what do you see all the dividing lines are gone because that top and those letters are now one unit they have been united okay so it's path union in inkscape and uh in the pathfinder palette on illustrator i think it's unite something like that i can't remember off the top of my head yeah i think it's unite okay so we're going to do the exact same thing to join the bottom we're going to just click that bottom bar not anything else we just want the bottom bar because we want the outer design and now the courtney part is a attached to the top so when we hold shift and click just on the c it's going to unite all of it basically or select all of it with one click because it's already one piece then we're gonna do the exact same thing path union and now the same thing has happened the bottom has joined seamlessly to the top and the name in the center you could at this point very well just export it or save as an svg and send it to the glowforge and it'll cut just perfectly you could also i'm a little weird this way i like to save just in case something knocks into it or something moves i like to go back in and join all those little cutting pieces back together so i just do a a quick command or control g to group it all together now if i you know accidentally move my mouse in a weird way or do something silly or stupid which happens a lot uh when i move it nothing else comes apart those little pieces are going to stay exactly where they're supposed to be okay and now you don't need to move it around on the uh the art board or anything it should be perfectly fine and ready to go you can just save as if i'm not mistaken it's an sv it's already an svg so you save as svg and it already exists i'm not gonna replace it because i don't want the name courtney in my file so you would just save it i like to save it to my desktop for you know quick and easy export to the glowforge user interface okay so that is how you're going to use inkscape to weld text into the floral border i hope this was helpful sorry if you couldn't see as well i don't i'm not set up to do videos yet but i will set up my video recording system on my computer and make a more seamless video for you in the coming days

Channel: The Designer in the Woods

Views: 3,737

Keywords: Glowforge, Laser cutting, Inkscape, tutorial

Id: G5k3hXTocnE

Length: 17min 42sec (1062 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 23 2020