Manual Tabbing Feature request

Loving the forum, great addition to great software :wink:

Is there any chance/possibility of adding to the dot/perf features by having a way to place tabs or breaks manually??

Maybe by placing a special character etc on the design so its picked up by the perf width and places a break where the character is placed for the perf width setting???

Would be really useful for a lot of stuff i do :wink:

According to https://lightburn.fider.io/posts/306/automatic-part-tabbing-tool

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Yeah thats pretty much what i do now, but tonights job was mixed sizes so a small part with large “cut” space would get one tab which was but the longer paths got too many tabs still.

The fix here is sit and separate all the parts by sizes and apply suitable cut lengths - this gets tedious real fast when there are a lot of files and loads of parts. Running round using the human brain and placing a tab just where its needed would be 100% faster :wink:

If you’re wanting tabs to prevent parts falling through after being cut here’s what I do. I put application/transfer tape on the underside of the thin materials I’m cutting. The material is cut cleanly through but not the tape (the diode beam passes through it). The pieces all stay nicely attached to the tape until I peel it off or peel the cut pieces from it.

Maybe just resize what you already have for each distance? Drag ends to lengthen.

HI, this is on a 60W Co2 laser, pretty sure tape won’t do it, plus the material is 2mm cardboard with a fairly delicate surface. :wink:

The parts are a fixed size, it just needs a manual tab feature really, some parts need two tabs, others 3 or more ands on.

I just tried manually adding a tab by hovering over a line on a drawn shape and pressing the I key to insert a new node then doing that again a short distance away. Pressing the D key on the line between the two new nodes deletes that new short line leaving a space/tab in the line. For some reason this doesn’t work on a square, rectangle or circle done with the shape drawing tools though.

Rectangle, ellipse, polygon and even text tool generate what are internally known as “primitive objects” and do not allow node editing of that shape until object is converted to path.

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OK, makes sense Rick. I normally would do something like this in Illustrator so I’m not up to speed using Lightburn with these type of drawing operations. Tabs can be manually added wherever needed by doing what I mentioned above after converting primitive objects to paths then.

This is ok but the tabs we use can be down to 0.3mm wide and all need to be the same. I’ll happily wait for development, this is one app that will live on the top of my most-used pile :wink:

We tried doing it in Illustrator but manually breaking paths and deleting the tiny segment inside the break is just no on plus there is no way to accurately break the path a specific distance on angles and curves etc.

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