Help with illustrator file in lightburn inverting engrave

LightBurn Software Questions
1

Hi there!
I’m fairly new to Lightburn but have experience in AI. We got our laser about a week ago ( Nova 24 ) and noticing some things when I import a AI file into lightburn.

  1. Lightburn sometimes doubles my stroke lines. I have go in and " delete duplicates"
  2. Sometimes another layer pops up called C23 and it’s pink. I always have to delete it.
  3. I know with stamps we have to create a duplicate of the bounding box and set that to red in order to invert the design but do I have to do that with all of my designs such as regular wood engraving?
    I also do wooden dog tags. I feel like Im missing something or doing something wrong in AI with my files before I import them. Seems to be these steps shouldn’t have to happen once it goes to Lightburn.
    I hope someone understands what I’m talking about. I can post a file if needed.
2

  1. This is generally caused when you have a shape with both fill and stroke applied in Illustrator. It saves as two paths, one for the fill and one for the stroke, so that’s how it imports.

  2. This is the closest color LightBurn has to pure white. If you see this, it means you painted over something with white, instead of cutting the white part out of the shape.

  3. LightBurn uses what’s called an odd/even fill rule. What this means is that every time you cross an edge, it toggles the fill off & on, so to make a hole in something, you just draw another shape inside:
    image
    … and to ‘invert’ something, you just add a line outside, or remove one if there already is one:
    image

3

Hello
Thank you for this explanation. My AI file does not have a filled shape though. The outline of the ornament I am trying to engrave is just a stroke with no fill set to .001.

4

… and this specific AI file is doubling up, or including the pink layer you mentioned? Can you email the AI file to support at lightburnsoftware so I can take a look? (If you do, include a link to this thread so we know what it’s referring to)

5

Sure! What is the email?

6

Support at lightburnsoftware dot com, actually, but that’s the address.

7

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