Does anyone have any tips for doing perforated lines on the laser cutter? Something that would allow one to tear along a predetermined line partially cut in the material. A mix of cutting and engraving doesn’t quite do the trick.
I’m teaching myself Inkscape, but I haven’t yet figured out a method for perforated lines, beyond simply drawing every single dot or dash individually. If Illustrator has a better tool for perforations, I’m willing to give that a shot instead.
Can you change line style to dashes in the stroke and fill settings?
You can normally add dashes to lines but I don’t think they convert directly in to JobControl, however in Illustrator you can ‘expand’ the fill or stroke of a shape into it’s component parts.
If you expand the fill it would be a engravable area, where as if you expand the stroke it would probably become a number of short lines.
Another approach is a shape on a path, that allows you to repeat the shape along a path (such as with a custom stroke) then to expand outlines.
Can you do a sketch of what you want and I can play around and figure it out then explain.
I had this same issue a while back, I wanted dotted lines to represent rivers on a map. It would have killed me to do them one by one!
I think these were the instructions I found that solved it for me, I used the ones for inkscape and it worked! The trick to check in outline view was very helpful too.
In Inkscape, you can change the line style to dotted or dashed - setting that’s just next to the line thickness. I’ve used that to make the laser cut intermittently so that paper folds in the right places. Whilst getting that right, I spent a lot of time tearing paper!
One word of advice - if you change the length of a line after setting it to be dashed, the dashes can also shrink/resize.
That’s peculiar, because I’ve actually tried the dotted/dashed lines a couple times before, and JobControl just ignored them… I assumed it wasn’t a viable technique. Guess I just need to experiment more!
Aha… 2 thoughts spring to mind…
Maybe I did something like “convert Path to Object” or similar to the dotted lines. Don’t remember it - but possible.
Last time I tried to use Inkscape with the laser, it wasn’t recognising cut lines at all due to an update… I feel like maybe that’s been resolved now (?)
It is definitely possible though!
In connection to the above - I think this video around the mid point may be helpful: