Inkscape help

[War Hammer]

Hello all,

I have a problem that I cannot seem to find a solution for and I am hoping that I may get some advice from those on this Forum.

When I design I use both Photoshop and Inkscape. I do this because these two programs are familiar to me. The issue arises when I bring the file into Inkscape.

When I execute a “trace bitmap” command my lines turn into circles. Then when I go to cut on my Dynatorch table instead of a fine line I am getting a ton of blowouts as it cuts in a circle and not just in a line.

I am wondering if someone can help me find a way to design and create a DXF without “tracing” in inkscape.

I have Adobe products but I am not familiar with Illustrator. Any help would be awesome.

Thanks in advance.

Kendall

[Billythegoat]

All I use is Inkscape and that has never happened to me while "tracing bitmap". There has got to be some parameters that are off. Maybe try uninstalling and reinstalling. Never know.

As far as dxfs go. If you are using sheetcam just save whatever you do as an svg and import to sheetcam. The only times that I've had a problem with this process is when it was my own fault.

Hopefully the court jester chimes in. He is our Inkscape guru around here. Good luck

Eric

[acourtjester]

When you save in DXF both the boxes need to be clear.

box.JPG (79.75 KiB) Viewed 1124 times

box.JPG (79.75 KiB) Viewed 1124 times

[DXF]

Set the base unit to "in" also.

Dave Hanks

[War Hammer]

I guess I did not describe the problem well enough.

So in Photoshop I design things. In the attached example it is just two boxes. I save the file as a JPG. (Photoshop cannot save a dxf file)

Then I open the file in Inkscape. I then have to trace the design. I use the "trace bitmap" command. When I do that I delete the jpg. file and I change the setting to zero Fill, I click on Stroke Paint, then I go to stroke style and change the settings to 0.001 inches.

When I do that I end up with a circle around all my lines. in the attached image I end up with two "shadow boxes" instead of two line boxes.

Man I such at explaining stuff. I hope the attached pictures help with my lousy explanations.

All of this happens BEFORE I can even save the file as a DXF.

Thanks for all the replies. Any further help would be greatly appreciated

[acourtjester]

Ok after checking a few things this is what I found, I drew a square in Paint and another in the CAD program I use saved as JPEG files. The result were no matter how thin I drew in paint, and use both edge detection and brightness cutoff traces. And changed the line thickness they had a double line as yours.
I first though you used edge detection which would show both sides of a line, and brightness cutoff was what you should use. I was wrong, the problem is the drawing software, when I used the CAD software and did brightness cutoff it worked as desired a single line down to 0.001".
I always use brightness cutoff on the files I an tracing as normally it gives only a single line. I don't have photoshop so I cannot help you with that software. I keep saying some packages don't play nice with each other. You could try one of the free CAD packages to find one that works for you, I use TurboCAD as it is cheap and easy for me to use and understand
The image below shows the differences the outside line is from the CAD jpeg file and the others are from Paint jpeg file.

[War Hammer]

That is what I was leaning toward. I had assumed that it was Photoshop and my drawings. I will look into a cad program and see if that solves my problem.

Thanks for the help.