Inkscape to Easel questions

OK guys. I finally have gotten to where I’m pretty comfortable with my X-carve configuration, and I surfaced the wasteboard last night to get rid of a crown in the middle. Since I haven’t had a lot of time to use my machine due to home improvement projects, I’ve at least taken some time at work to play with Inkscape to trace pictures and create SVG files. I created one which I was happy with and ready to cut, but now that I sit down with Easel and import it, I’m not getting the results I expected. I have a few issues…

  1. When I import my SVG, the small areas inside of the top of the letters “A” and “R”, which appear in my SVG file the same shade of grey as the areas outside of the letters, show up in easel as black, full through cuts. It’s easy enough to manually fix that, but I would prefer to know what I’m doing wrong.

  2. When I create the file in Inkscape, the grey background surrounding the letters has a black stroke. My intent is for the letters in the middle to be white (no cut at all), the area surrounding the letters to be milled down part way (in this case, a 60% grey, so I’m taking off the top 40% of the material if I understand correctly, and that seems confirmed in Easel’s cut depth), and the stroke around the grey, along with the circle at the far right I intend to be cut through. But Easel doesn’t see the stroke around the grey, so I would be milling into my material, but never having it cut out at the end. What am I doing wrong here?

SVG file here… https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwkLC2DKGUoNeFhVM1VCakdRTm8/view?usp=sharing

Hi Matt,

It looks like issue 1 is related to the “fill-opacity” property of those SVG paths. Manually removing this property from the SVG text file solved the problem. I’m not sure why Inkscape is assigning this property to those elements and nothing else.

For issue 2, when an SVG object has both fill and stroke, Easel converts it to fill only. A workaround would be to make a copy of the grey background and give it a black outline and no fill.

Here’s an edited version of your SVG. For best results, I’d suggest setting that stroke around the shape to cut “Outside path”.

Hope that helps!