I am in the process of creating some designs to be cut with my laser cutter. These are coasters with some text on it and some optional shapes. What I was planning is some sort of general design (with optional shapes) with a variable text.
The way I have set this up now is that I have a SVG design file defining the shape of the coaster with some optional engraving shapes to spice things up. I then imported the SVG into Lightburn and added some text using Lightburn. This to avoid having to convert the text to path in Inkscape.
Now the big question: what if my SVG design file changes? Let’s say I want to make the coasters slightly larger. This would mean that I have to update the Lightburn project with the new design. For one Lightburn project this is ok, but what I have multiple coaster designs?
Is there some sort of replace function in Lightburn? How do you guys handle this?
Can you import the slightly larger svg into LB and make it its own cut layer (with same speed/power/etc as the existing coaster layer. Then uncheck output on the existing coaster layer?
Thanks for your reply. I think I should elaborate this a bit more.
Consider the following example:
The big red circle, triangle, rounded rectangle and the small blue circle are all part of a SVG design file created with Inkscape.
This file was imported to Lightburn. The text has been placed from within Lightburn for me to alter the text per design.
The triangle, rounded square and the circle all have their own color. The reason for this is that by doing it this way I can make different designs from only one Lightburn project. I just disable for example the rounded square and the circle layer and I get a product with the text hi and a triangle.
Now my question was if there is some way of reloading the SVG design file into an existing Lightburn project. An example would be that I add a star as a optional shape, but I do not want to make my designs all over just because I added a star. If I could just reload the design file from within Lightburn this would save me a ton of work.
Like said my designs are coasters with different texts and they can use one or more of the optional shapes to create the final design.
Simple - don’t do the text part of the design in lightburn. You should be managing this in whatever program you’re using.
If it’s illustrator, create multiple layers. Have the original text and outlined version for output. I copy only the design for lasering onto a blank file and do outlining there, then save it to be imported. I don’t import my design file.
