I have tried searching for a solution with no avail… perhaps because I am using the wrong words.
I need to put a cut thru 4mm MDF sign in an art deco font. The font is not “stencil” style like the military fonts, so when the laser cuts it, the middle of the letters fall out and the “skinny” parts of the letters are too fragile.
You can see the before and after in the attached screenshot… I did this manually with the trim and delete node tool which is doable but rather time consuming.
So question is: is there an easy automated way of doing this “reinforcement” of stranded or under supported parts of a cut file? Kind of like with the “tabs” option but designed to bridge the gap to orphaned parts of a cut file?
I tried the “Merge Shapes” tool, but could never get it to do anything. The option was always grayed out.
Can you explain a bit about how you’re planning to use this design? Your solution design isn’t making sense to me unless you plan to use the resulting output as a stencil.
The manual solution I did above obviously works, but I feel like there has to be a better way with all the things that Lightburn can do. I feel like I am still scratching the surface of it’s capabilities!
In this case there’s no push button solution to this but here’s what I would suggest:
Group the entirety of the original design
Create rectangular strips shaped and positioned where you want the tabs to be. They needn’t fit exactly along the original shape. They at least need to cover all the portions where you want the final tabs to be located
Group the entirety of the strips
Select grouped original design, then add grouped strips to the selection.
OK… I have tried this a few times from scratch now.
Put it in Text Mode
Type the word “Blue”
Create some small rectangles to act as cut lines
Put the cut lines over the original lettering
Group and highlight everything and try to subtract.
Group everything and try to merge/subtract
If you look at the updated screenshot the only boolean option is to weld. I can’t do the Boolean subtract which is what gives me what I am looking for. I tried grouping the rectangles separately, ungrouping everything, converting to path… but only boolean weld is available.
Weirdly I tried before and got all the boolean options but have no clue what I did differently!
Any idea what turns these boolean options on or off?
Are the steps you listed exactly what you did? Those don’t match my steps.
I suspect the part you’re missing is that you need to end up with exactly 2 sets of grouped objects: 1 is the original text (if you’re using a Text object then you needn’t group it); the other is all the “tab” shapes. You do not want to group all the shapes together.
The important part is to make sure the rectangles are selected SECOND. They don’t have to be grouped necessarily, but that is easier.
So I laid in all my cut rectangles where I wanted them (just use copy and pasted a bunch of copies to move into the right place with CTRL-C then CTRL-V), then moved the original letters out of the way to make it easier to select and group the rectangles.
Then I moved the letters back in place.
With the letters selected, HOLD DOWN SHIFT and then select the rectangles.
Boolean subtract will then be no longer greyed out and is available to use.
