PDF Import challenges (and AI) - Any tips

Hoping someone can help. For some PDF’s/AI files, they import super well. Of course I need to set fills and such, but generally, all components are there.

I’ve got a file that opens fine in preview. Fine in Illustrator. But importing to LightBurn, items get lost. Attaching a pic of the file as it is - and what imports into LightBurn (when I change all layers to line).

And yep - I double checked to see if maybe there were duplicates of some of the text that would have cause it to “cancel itself out” in the view. No duplicates. It only imported the outline and the top word

image

Check the following settings:


Also do you mind posting your Lightburn project file for us to take a look.

Open the file in Illustrator.

Select>Object>Text Objects

Type>Create Outlines

Then export a PDF or AI and import into LB. This will explode the text into shapes. If you open in Illustrator, and you are missing the font on your system, it will tell you that it is missing. You would then need to get that font on your system, and do the same process I show above.

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That did the trick! Thank you SO Much!

And thanks also, parsec - I did check that setting, but it was Ralph’s that got it corrected!

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LightBurn doesn’t currently import text from AI files or PDFs, mostly because they use embedded fonts, and the way they store the text has a LOT of options and is very complicated to replicate.

Ralph’s suggestion above is the right way to do it if you don’t need the text to be in a text-editable form. You can also select and copy the raw text from the PDF view, then paste that into LightBurn and change the font & size to match what you need. This is more cumbersome, but will result in something that’s still text that can be edited.

Tks, Oz. I assumed that if I had all fonts installed that it would be fine…but what you’re saying from a tech perspective makes total sense.

We run an engraving shop/contract engraving shop with a host of different lasers (galvo co2, uv, fiber as well as gantry co2). If your’e up for it - I’d love to drop a couple ideas your way on a few things that could greatly help our workflow if implemented into LB. I don’t think they’d be heavy tech lifts.

I believe I’ve logged them in the request list - but a 5 minute convo would probably make it make more sense.

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