LightBurn Tips and Lesser Known Features

I think a topic where we can leave useful tips and work flow suggestions is a good use of this forum. I know that there are tons of shortcut keys incorporated into LB and when I discover a particularly useful shortcut I do my best to memorize it. But just finding them all has been a bit difficult for me.

So here is my best tip for using LB. I may be the last person on the planet that learned this but in case there are some new users that have not discovered this yet I will describe it.

I often need to create several items for the same customer and having just one .LBRN file for the customer really helps me organize and keep track of the work I am doing for that customer especially when they call 6 months later and want another copy of something I have already made them.

But I thought I was limited by LB to only have the one thing I wanted to make on the screen at any given time, because having multiple items would move the work origin point around making it difficult/impossible to align material on the laser bed.

After I asked for a solution for this (perceived) issue, it was explained to me that LB already has a very good process for dealing with this. In the Laser tab there are two on/off switches for “Cut Selected Graphics” and Use Selection Origin.

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Turning both of these witches on (Green) and then selecting just the current shapes you want to cut/scan will cause LB to ignore everything else on the screen and to set the work origin (small Green square) to set based on only the selected items.

This was a real game changer for me, since it allows me to have multiple complete and seperate objects on the screen and only send the selected one to the laser with an origin point that makes sense.

Now I have just one LBRN file for each customer with everything belonging to that customer in the same file.

I apologize if this is already known by everyone, but for me learning about it really made LB way more useful.

If anyone else has any tips or super useful shortcut keys they use all the time please take a few minutes and share.

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I discovered that also on the new version. I was cutting Baltic Birch and one section didn’t cut out all the way. It was really handy to go back and just cut that section.
It would be sweet if I was cutting a circle that didn’t cut out all the way and start where the bad spot was instead of starting at beginning of circle. Hope this makes since

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One of the things I have planned is a “bridge layer” which would let you draw shapes around areas to exclude for cutting, allowing you to define your own tabs / bridges. It would be relatively easy to extend that to also have the inverse of it, a “cut only this” layer, where you enclosed what you wanted cut with a shape, but the shape itself would be otherwise ignored. It’s something I’d like to do if I can do it clean.

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That would be a great feature to have .

It’s a pity there isn’t the option to create a knowledge database that way people could search for help and tips there. Little tips on functions like the one above can make so much difference to people who don’t know LB to well.

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It’s one of reasons we created this forum - as we collect things like this we’ll probably set up a “Tips and Tricks” area and start filling it in with snippets like this that can be searched or browsed easily.

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I see mention of a wiki included with this forum. Is that a thing that might be created in the future?