I have a problem that all PDFs get imported with inverted images,
I found out in the forum that I can hit a checkbox in the engraving settings to invert again,
unfortunately with no preview in the editor.
That’s not practical in daily work if you don’t want to waste material on a regular basis.
I have been really happy with lightburn due to it’s useful editing tools that avoid going forth and back to Illustrator in many cases but since I had the first job with engravings I always run into problems.
SVG clipping masks are not recognized, neither are those in PDFs.
If the image is just cut by a rectangle, it’s not to bad to make the fix by cutting it in lighburn, but for irregular shapes it’s very annoying.
Will file compatibility be added in the future?
the other question: how can I prepare a PDF in a way images are not getting inverted.
I found a post that said re-save it with mac-preview. Unfortunately that didn’t do the job for me.
Any further information on how I can make sure PDFs get recognized in a way they are showing up in any other program?
I’m happy to test this on mine. If it’s not something coincidental or weird about PDFs lately and if I can replicate it, I can escalate this to the dev team.
If you have a file handy that you’d be willing to share that behaves this way, please share it here. I can invite others to test too.
This strikes me as strange. what happens when you zoom in completely?
It could be this. I’ve enjoyed learning about some of the production differences between graphic design and CNC process planning.
Graphic designers can overlay and conceal features beneath more prominent features. In CNC processes if it’s on a layer and set to produce, it will be produced.
The Mask tool in LightBurn is excellent. If you import all the shapes and images in the pdf into LightBurn, move them, then apply the Mask tool in LightBurn you can ‘Bake it’ in LightBurn and it should look ‘as it should be’.
With this I mean that the “invert” setting in the engrave settings is not represented in the editor.
This is basically true for any file and probably a behaviour which was decided upon.
I guess it would make more sense to show the invert setting in the editor.
My workaround for the clipping mask problem was to export my whole work area as one huge bitmap instead of several images inside clipping masks, which means a lot of white in the image.
forgetting to uncheck the invert setting the laser will just start to engrave the whole area black, potentially ruining a complete sheet.
regarding the file, pdf upload is not allowed so I have to share a dropbox link:
Open it anyhwere outside lightburn and it will display the way it should.
I wont deny that, it works pretty well. However Illustrator is the most common software for vector graphic design, it can handle bitmaps and it would make sense if layouts prepared in Illustrator would just work in Lightburn. I really like lightburn a lot, but clipping masks worked in any other laser software I have used before (like Jobcontrol, Visicut, Universal laser print driver) based on that I guess it’s possible to just implement them.
If you compare it to CNC, CAD or Lightburn you could see the clipping mask as a non destructive boolean operation which makes sense in many ways.
The original file was a SVG.
I tried to convert it in Illustrator to PDF to see if clipping masks would be accepted that way.
If I save it as AI the pictures do not get inverted
