Hello! Sorry if this is an odd question but I am new to Lightburn (just purchased today!) and I am adapting my laser cutting work flow.
I normally work in Inkscape to generate SVG files (I previously heavily used K40 Whisperer) and part of my work flow heavily relies on “baking” many SVGs into slightly different versions with many hidden layers.
When I import SVGs from Inkscape into Lightburn it seems that all of the hidden layers are now fully visible. I noticed the following setting to seemingly respect Illustrator file “hidden” flag for layers so I was hoping there was the same thing for SVGs.
It looks like Inkscape is using the style flag “display:none” so I was hoping that LightBurn could somehow respect that.
Sorry again if this is covered elsewhere in the documentation!
What is the purpose of hiding the layers? Would disabling the “Show” field for the cut layer serve the same purpose? This is something you’d have to do manually yourself, however.
Note, however, that conversion of “layers” in Inkscape to LightBurn will only correlate to colors. LightBurn doesn’t care so much about Inkscape native layer hierarchy.
I’m not aware of any way to disable import of hidden layers. May be easier to save a special SVG without the hidden layers or to simply delete them after import.
Note that you can also copy and paste objects directly from Inkscape to LightBurn.
I suspect this is where any workflow gains will be made depending on what drove this approach.
Consider the following project (Inkscape). I have many icons I chose from and save out different versions of the same image with different icons. The “project” has all of these icons as templates, but when I save out the different versions I simply hide the “template”/inconsequential layers. When this is imported into LightBurn, all of the invisible “template”-y data is now visible. This example is pretty cut and dry but sometimes I leave “debug” guide lines in there and what not so sussing those out would be much more painful.
Would disabling the “Show” field for the cut layer serve the same purpose?
If I can’t get a way to ignore hidden layers like with Illustrator what I might end up doing is making all of my template data a specific color to make make own sort of “tool” layer to manually hide. Tedious, but probably the smallest adaptation to the world flow I can think of.
I understand that “layers” means different things in Inkscape vs LightBurn but I was hoping that when LightBurn sees the “visibility:hidden” flag (which is a sibling to the color AFAIK, so it must already be parsing this data in the SVG) that it simply skips it all together and does zero processing on it.
One last thing I might try is to see if Inkscape can export an SVG and strip all hidden data. I haven’t found anything thus far in that regard though.
For these I’d suggest setting the color to match one of the two Tool layers.
Got you. The most obvious way to handle this would be to add each of these individual shapes as entries in the Art Library. That way you could just pull one out whenever you needed it… no managing directly from the master template.
Yeah I guess I am in denial about using LightBurn as the “designer”. In my mind the main selling point for me (over K40 Whisperer which I used before) was the awesome, advanced cut settings that allow you to tweak by group, individually, etc. and I would mostly use it as a “stager”/“printer” once my design is completed elsewhere.
I’ll try out the tool coloring and see how that feels.
Small followup what might make it slightly easier (and perhaps this is what you meant) but if you set the correct RGB value (found here) you can import directly to T1 and T2.
This is indeed what I meant. This would allow you set the color once and not have to swap things around.
This wouldn’t actually have you using LightBurn as the designer. You’d complete the design elsewhere. Once the design is complete you’d stage the designs into the art library. You’d use LightBurn for final layout and prep. But I’m realizing one flaw would be that the tool layer wouldn’t be preserved as a tool layer. Art Library is vector information only. Cut settings aren’t included in that. So you’d have to reassign any intended tool layers when pulling from the library.
