Hello, i have a question about masking, i made a pattern of circles and wrote something on top (imported a path with letters), made the letters white, marked both and used "object, mask, set" to cut the mask. It worked, now i have the letters with my circle pattern. But when i want to export this to my laser cutter as a dfx it does not work, dfx is just empty layers.
Also when i click "F2" i see the circles outside the mask again. Is there a way to save the sucessful cutout without the mask in the background still saved? I mean like if you click "rasterize layer" in photoshop (but that is pixel based). Also when i hit "Object, ungroup" the mask falls apart, i need to get to a state with the cutout that it is not possible to get back to this point. Just save the cutout.
I'm afraid that I would need to see your SVG file, to be able to answer. There's too much room for wrong guesses with only the verbal description. Then there's recently a lot of people using a mask, when instead clipping is more appropriate.
Although I would be surprised if the laser cutter could ignore either a mask or a clipping path, and only cut what's inside it. I don't know....maybe DXF does not recognize a clip or mask?
Neither clipping or masking actually gets rid of the contents outside of the clip or mask path. At least not in Inkscape. Everything outside is only hidden. And I would be surprised if the cutter could interpret that.
Maybe there's a better way to approach the drawing? You might need to use path operations instead of clip or mask, if this is something for a cutter.
If you try to save it as DFX and then open it you see it is emty.
You are maybe right that my aproach itself is wrong. First i tried with clip, it works well but not for letters that have a "hole" in it like "O", "A", "R", because there the "hole is not clipped correctly.
Hhmm....I thought I had a solution worked out for you, until I remembered that you want to cut it. Using your test file as an example, what is it that you want to cut out? You want to cut the shape of the white object? Or you want to cut all the little circles?
Also, there's a problem with the pattern of little circles. None of the circles are whole. So that should be fixed before you make your cutting file. Even for the possible solultion I might have worked out, it results in the tiny circles being made of a few different segments for each circle.
And to answer your question, i would like to cut the circles that make up the shape of the "R" in the new file, like you see the "R" in the new file, as a example.
In other words i mean in this example i want the laser to cut many circles and when you look at them from further away you see the shape of the letters.
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Welcome to the forum!
I'm afraid that I would need to see your SVG file, to be able to answer. There's too much room for wrong guesses with only the verbal description. Then there's recently a lot of people using a mask, when instead clipping is more appropriate.
Although I would be surprised if the laser cutter could ignore either a mask or a clipping path, and only cut what's inside it. I don't know....maybe DXF does not recognize a clip or mask?
Neither clipping or masking actually gets rid of the contents outside of the clip or mask path. At least not in Inkscape. Everything outside is only hidden. And I would be surprised if the cutter could interpret that.
Maybe there's a better way to approach the drawing? You might need to use path operations instead of clip or mask, if this is something for a cutter.
Hello, thank you for your reply, i made a test file and uploaded it here:
http://www.filedropper.com/test_20157
If you try to save it as DFX and then open it you see it is emty.
You are maybe right that my aproach itself is wrong. First i tried with clip, it works well but not for letters that have a "hole" in it like "O", "A", "R", because there the "hole is not clipped correctly.
Hhmm....I thought I had a solution worked out for you, until I remembered that you want to cut it. Using your test file as an example, what is it that you want to cut out? You want to cut the shape of the white object? Or you want to cut all the little circles?
Also, there's a problem with the pattern of little circles. None of the circles are whole. So that should be fixed before you make your cutting file. Even for the possible solultion I might have worked out, it results in the tiny circles being made of a few different segments for each circle.
I just quickly made this file as example, i must have used the wrong settings for the circles, sorry for that!
Here a fixed version:
http://www.filedropper.com/test1_203
And to answer your question, i would like to cut the circles that make up the shape of the "R" in the new file, like you see the "R" in the new file, as a example.
In other words i mean in this example i want the laser to cut many circles and when you look at them from further away you see the shape of the letters.
Oh then that's perfect! This should work.
No clipping or masking needed. Possibly you'll need to do some cleanup here and there, but it looks like a pretty clean and straightforward process.
It worked, thank you so much!!
👍 You're welcome.