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After using Break Appart feature everything cuts in segments

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2023-03-23

Today I am trying Lightburn for the first time and have encountered something I am not clear about…

I have designed an object and cut it… But every time it doesn’t cut all the way through, so I have to keep coming back to the study and changing settings (speed and passes) and still can’t get there.

 

Since my computer and cutter are a distance appart and I got fed up of going back and forth in the rain, I decided to do a test where I used the text tool to create “1234567890” and then planned to increase the number of passes for each.

This is basic stuff, but of course the whole ‘word’ is one object… So I figured i could do them as 10 objects… Or I could look for some kind of “ungroup” feature.

 

And after looking around, I found the “break apart” feature which did exactly what I wanted, or so I thought.

But when I tried to select each number, I found that it was in little segments, but this didn’t matter as I just used the select tool to draw a box around it and select the whole thing.

 

A few mins work later and I had the GCODE and I set off to test it… And it was just the job… I found that at 4 passes I was nearly through and 5 cuts perfectly… BUT… Whilst burning I noticed that it was cutting the nubmers in little segments… Constantly going over the same spot.

 

So I came back to Lightburn to try and work out how to fix this… And if I grab all the segments of one of my numbers and use the ‘GROUP’ feature, it restores its back to a single object… However, when cutting (Seen on the PREVIEW) it still cuts the number as little segments.

 

To recreate this I simply used the TEXT tool and drew 7… Then PREVIEW and it cuts as you would expect (i.e all the way around the permimeter)… Then I used ‘Break Apart’ and now it cuts in segments… And then finally GROUPED it so its one object again and it still cuts in segments.

 

Is there anything I am overlooking? Or is this just a limitation?

Is there a way to take an object (ie a word)… and ‘break’ it into multiple objects (letters) without it breaking each object into segments?

 

Sorry for the long post… I could have just got to the point, but I wanted to put some context.

 

Thanks in advance

Jon

C

    • Williams

      2023-03-27
      ‘Break Apart’ shatters an object into all the individual lines and curves that make it up. A rectangle becomes 4 distinct lines, for example.

So, the behavior you describe is exactly as intended.

The command you’re looking for to be able to move individual parts of text around is “Convert to Path”. A text object remembers that it is text, which means you can re-type it, bend it, change the font, etc.

To move individual letters around, you’d either need to create one text object for each letter, or just ‘Convert to Path’ after making the text, and then you can move the shapes. They’ll look the same, but they no longer “remember” that they’re text, and are now just shapes like anything else you might draw.

To re-combine what you have back into continuous shapes, ungroup everything, select it all, and click Edit > Auto Join. That will look for lines or curves whose ends are touching and will connect them back together into continuous shapes.
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