I’m trying to understand why Lightburn shows both Line interval and DPI, when they can not be set individually. It’s probably just to allow users to input whichever they prefer. In some ways, it would be nice to also show it as “What is your laser dot size (vertically)?”
The DPI tooltip is “How many horizontal dots to cut per inch”. Isn’t it really “How many vertical dots to cut per inch”?
And my question is, can we set the horizontal DPI? or is this DPI both horizontal and vertical?
Or does the horizontal DPI come only from the image source and the size of the image we’ve asked Lightburn to produce? How does lightburn decide what the maximum frequency to blip the laser at when moving horizontally?
Line interval is y-axis motion - so ‘vertical’.
DPI is x-axis motion - so ‘horizontal’.
If you set your scan angle to 90 deg, Line interval becomes ‘horizontal’, DPI becomes ‘vertical’.
‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ are less useful than axis references, as every machine is different, but every machine has X and Y axes.
The line interval setting sets the line interval. It should match the beam width of your laser. When you set it, the DPI will be calculated. If it is smaller than the beam width, you get overlap. If it is larger, you get line spacing.
LB automatically resamples an image to match the output size and DPI specified.
In LightBurn, horizontal and vertical DPI are equal, in order to simplify the math, and to simplify things for the user.
Interval is what’s used to set the distance between horizontal scanning lines, and the horizontal spacing is taken from that as well. DPI is used as a more intuitive way to represent the numbers, that’s all.