Our Quick Tip Video this week is on the Remove overlapping lines setting, which tells your laser to cut shared lines in your designs just one time.
This is among the handiest settings in the LightBurn toolkit, and one I’ve saved to my personal default Optimization Settings.
It doesn’t come into play for every project, but it’s painful when you start a job it would have been helpful for, only to realize you forgot to turn it on.
For more information on this and other Optimization settings, here’s a link to our documentation:
When the graphics are selected, you can usually tell by the appearance of the animated “marching ants” pattern — in places where the lines overlap, they’ll be thicker, or flash, or appear not to move at all.
Is there a specific task you’re looking to accomplish by identifying overlapping lines rather than have them automatically removed?
If you’re looking to identify entire shapes that are overlapping, you can go to Edit → Delete Duplicates, but that will only identify and delete shapes that are completely identical, and placed right on top of one another.
I use an AutoCAD clone, ProgeCAD, to create my designs. One of the advantages of this is that I can extrude my parts, assemble them in 3D, and then check for intersections that shouldn’t be there before cutting. My problem is that a polyline with overlapping lines won’t close, and so can’t extrude. When this happens I have to manually hunt for the overlap, since my ten year old copy of ProgeCAD doesn’t have AutoCAD’s overkill command and I can’t justify the expense of buying a later copy. Being able to quickly identify where the overlaps are would save me a bit of manual work from time to time.
