We’ve recently added a new tool, innocently called ‘Cut Shapes’. It will intelligently cut a design in a way that would allow you to run the design in sections. For now, you must manually create the cutting shape, but we’ll be expanding the feature.
Imagine your laser is too small to run this design:
The Boolean tools could work, but the upper line of text would end up with “joining lines” connecting the parts of the letter e where it cuts. Ideally, those would simply be cut, similar to doing it manually with the node editor, and the lower e, in the word ‘Filled’ would have those closing lines, so the shape would fill correctly, like this:
The ‘Cut Shapes’ tool does exactly this - It keeps layer information, and mode, and cuts the shapes intelligently based on whether they are filled or not, and the cutting tool can be any shape, so you can also use this to crop designs (but not pictures yet). You could use the Boolean tools to do that before, if all your shapes were closed, but it would lose the layer assignments, and the new ‘Cut Shapes’ tool preserves those too.
The cutting path can be any shape, but needs to be a single, closed path.
Tools > Cut Shapes. The last selected shape is the cutting path, and it is discarded when used.