Will the feature of clipping masks ever be implemented?
For us this is would be a really crucial feature as we regularly need to work with SVGs that contain clipped images. We are using a trotec laser at the moment which reads the files without any problem but we are planning to switch to another laser and would rely on lightburn.
Please let us know if this is a feature we could hope for, or if it’s not going to happen.
I have seen an answer (actually, several, I think) explaining that SVG is a huge, complex standard (that’s true!) and it is very difficult to implement fully, plus some features might have no sense in a laser burning / cutting context.
I saw that about the capability to clone (have a reference on) an object, for example, a quite common process.
I suppose you can extract the clipping mask as a shape, and after import, use this shape and LB’s own clipping capabilities to reproduce the effect. Which is more work, of course…
Considering I can SVG clip an image with some CSS to work in any browser I would assume this to be a basic feature of a software tailored for vector editing and processing. Honestly I do not know any other program that can open SVGs but does not recognize the clipping. Considering lightburns internal tools work well to clip images I do not understand why they can’t make it work with SVG natively. We work with files that partially have dozens of clipped images, which never was an issue because we mostly worked with Trotec Jobcontrol or Ruby. As we started working with different service providers we’ll have to provide them with files that open well in lightburn. Preparing each of those files individually using lightburns internal features would be a huge pain. We are already considering workarounds like scripting in illustrator to make it a bit easier for us. It would be so much easier if lightburn would just work and we wouldn’t have to look for an annoying hack. That’s why I started this thread again…
I just keep replying every once in a while so the topic won’t close. Hello Lightburn developers, any news on this - or should I just forget about it and live with it?
I was reading your previous response, where you state “As we started working with different service providers we’ll have to provide them with files that open well in lightburn. Preparing each of those files individually using lightburns internal features would be a huge pain.”
My question is why do you have to provide them with a Lightburn file? If you provide them with a PDF file, that would show them what they need. It would be up to them to “clean up” the file to make it work in Lightburn.
The other option is to export a hi res JPEG or PNG of the clipping masked images, then export a SVG of the vector data and align them in Lightburn. Doesn’t seem that hard, unless I am missing something.
You are right - we could provide them with a PDF that displays correctly in every other software except Lightburn and let the provider deal with the shortcomings of lightburn. The downside of this is a high likeliness that they mess up at some point. (The other thread is also targeting the issue that pdf images are randomly inverted) We can also prepare the files in Illustrator to display correctly in lightburn.
This can even be scripted partially. But then again processing hundreds of files is still a lot of work with the risk of overlooking details and receive failed cuts.
It can all be done - sure. But if I use ruby (trotec) all files are processed exactly the way they should.
I work with several lasers and lightburn is by far my favorite software. That’s the reason why invest the time to hopefully help make it better.
I do not know the reason why the clipping mask support is not implemented. Either it is very hard to do, or nobody complained about it yet. I hope the second option to be true and hopefully a few more people back my demand so it lands on their list. Please make a good software better!