Lately I have purchased several leather pattern digital files from Etsy sellers to make some client gifts. All the files as viewed in pdf or svg file viewed in web browser show the punch holes. Problem is when I import the svg file, the holes become a line. Is something I need to do when importing the file to correct this, or is there a way to recover the holes from the line? I’m currently running LightBurn Core 2.1.04 Laser is a XTool D1Pro 20W, but that shouldn’t make any difference to what is imported into LB.
Try importing the PDF and see how that works
The designer may have use some combination of stroke width and fill to create what looks like a hole, but is just a short fat line. LightBurn ignores the stroke width (because a laser spot has essentially no width) and any fill (because it must apply the layer’s Fill settings to a closed shape), so a fat line becomes … a line.
Open the SVG in a “drawing” program (Inkscape, et al) to examine the structure of those holes. If they’re fat lines, that’s the problem. Solving it is a whole 'nother problem, though.
I did try importing as pdf, but it was still the same result. I’ll open it in inkscape and see what that looks like.
can you show us the result of the import?
Can you give us a copy of the .svg that imported as the top portion of your image? I want to verify it has holes when opened in another piece of software, to try and see if the issue is with the file, or with LightBurn
I opened it in Inkscape and the holes are there, so it’s an issue with importing to LB.
I attempted to export from Inkscape and had the same issue if exported as SVG then imported into LB. I also tried exporting from Inkscape as a .tiff and the holes showed up when imported into LB but the file was so fuzzy it was useless. Doing a “trace object” didn’t produce a very clean copy either.
Can you upload the SVG file that looks good in Inkscape?
Select the up arrow button to upload SVG
They used a dotted line type in Adobe Illustrator to represent the circles. I opened it in the latest version of Affinity, and expanded the stroke, but it isn’t perfect. A few circles on the ends get distorted.
Your original SVG is on the Tool layer
card_holders.lbrn2 (361.2 KB)
Memo to self: Add another SVG fancy-line option to the list of Things That Don’t Laser! 
I saved the SVG to a JPG then traced it in LB
card_holders.lbrn2 (275.5 KB)
Cleaned up a little
card_holders.lbrn2 (263.3 KB)
Thank you to everyone that helped with this. Now I know why LB didn’t show it as circles, since they really were not circles to begin with. I’ve never used Affinity, but I may have to look into that software if I keep getting files made by others and not knowing how they created them.