Hello, I have had my Xcarve for about 6 months now and I have been using it to cut outlines out of acrylic and mdf. I am attempting to carve a seating chart for my sisters wedding and Easel Cant seem to generate a tool path when using a vbit. I have tried on two different computers both only running Easel with a decent ram on both with no luck. Is there any other software I can use to generate gcode/send jobs because if this is the only way…well…xcarve for sale!!! I am literally only trying to carve names with a font provided by easel.
Can you share the Easel file?
Click File - Share - Share Publicly - copy URL - click Save and post the URL here.
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https://easel.inventables.com/projects/mOkjWxFiLode_xGddyl7Ow#
The layout of my names will be different. I just put the font in there and names so far. I also noticed that on my material size 30x30 which is my total cut area on my 1000mm board reflects differently on the preview. It’s not showing the entire project on the piece of material although the work area and material size are exactly the same.
Thanks for the quick reply BTW.
Is the text going to be that small?
The work area is going to reflect whatever project you last did on your machine. Mine says 30x30 I just double checked. When I click on the text and go to “shape” It shows the project is 34.216 inches wide but its only reflecting an almost 28inches wide on the work area on left. Im baffled…
On a 30x30 board the text really isnt that small it just seems that way because you are looking at it on a screen. I blew it up on my tv monitor to 30inches to see the exact size after carved and the font is readable from 15 feet away.
I see that…weird.
I was asking about the text size because you said you were going to change the layout. That’s a lot of text…lots to calculate.
I’d recommend blocking out parts with zero depth rectangles and using separate workpieces.
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Ok I will try to block off sections at a time. As far as font size it will not change. I am just going to be centering tables and names under table numbers. Maybe add some simple floral on the border but thats it. I was curious about the size reflecting different so I opened a new project and all I did was put a “text box” and changed the shape to 30"x30" and it shows larger than the 30x30 material!?!?! Whats going on Inventables? Easel? Multiple computers multiple projects. I cant be the only one. Here is another example. Easel
The text box thing is weird, but text boxes are weird in most programs.
BTW…took 7min on my PC to generate toolpaths for the bottom half.
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Thanks for your help Neil! (my middle name btw lol) I’m going to give that a try and do a hard reset on my router. Could be that I suppose.
As someone who’s spent time working on Easel’s text handling, I can offer some explanation to this behavior. The underlying problem is that some fonts, especially the fancy cursive ones, may draw glyphs that extend beyond their reported bounding boxes. You can actually see this visually during text selection of characters as in this image.
Note that a large portion of ‘T’ isn’t highlighted. Same for the last ‘t’ but to a lesser degree
Unfortunately, we can’t simply fix this by scaling to the visual bounds since that would break existing projects built with this current behavior.
If you do want precise scaling of text, I can offer a hacky workaround. Add another shape to your design and set it’s depth to 0. Select both that shape and the text box, right click, and use “Combine” (or “Edit” menu then “Combine”).
This will convert the text object to a raw path shape in Easel. Setting the width/height or x/y position will now be exactly at the bounds of the text. The big drawback of this hack is that you can no longer edit the text since it’s a raw path.
We’re definitely aware of these problems and I’ve been exploring potential text manipulation improvements to Easel. Nothing I can share beyond that at the moment.
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Thank you so much for the in depth explanation. I am glad to know that it is only this way with text and wont affect other projects. I will be sure to keep an extra eye out on any projects that include text in the future. Thanks again!
Text is good but I am confused for font size.