Inkscape with a ULS?

[Andrea Herman]

(Cross-posted to Laser Engraving & Cutting & All Things Laser Engraving Facebook groups)
Does anyone use Inkscape with a Universal Laser Systems machine? If so, do you know thickness and color for the cut line? I've tried .01 inch/.025 mm & color= RGBA, but it doesn't seem to work.
I coordinate a makerspace at work. I'd like to encourage members to work on their design first at home if they wish and also offer a virtual class on Inkscape.
thanks for any help you provide.

[Brian Lamb]

I use Corel, but for vector cutting the line has to be under .010", I use .006".

[Andrea Herman]

Thanks, I'll try it.

Andrea

[Mike Null]

The default color for the cut line has been RGB red. You can likely change that to another color within the ULS driver.

Take a look at this. http://www.engraversnetwork.com/support/universal-lasers/configuring-software-laser/

[Lee DeRaud]

The default color for the cut line has been RGB red. You can likely change that to another color within the ULS driver.Depends on what you mean by "change to another color".

Within the 'advanced' driver dialog, you can set any of the 8 standard colors to raster-only, cut-only (still needs to be hairline width though), both (selected by line-width), or skip. What you can't do is change those standard colors from their pre-defined RGB values.

(Everything else is treated as gray-scale raster and dithered/screened/whatever as required. The latest Corel is very persistent about trying to use CMYK...I thought I had all the usual settings fixed to make RGB the default, but it keeps surprising me.)

[Lee DeRaud]

Ok, just for jollies, I installed Inkscape on my 'laser' computer. No joy whatsoever getting it to do vector output through the ULS driver, regardless of color and/or line width. I have a few more combinations of ULS driver settings and Inkscape settings to try, but I'm not optimistic. (I'm using Win10 and the latest available driver for my relatively ancient VL200, if that matters.)

I've got a couple of other things to try, but I'm starting think it's a bad choice for driving a laser: the print dialog has a "rendering" tab where you can select either raster or vector, making me wonder whether it can even do both in the same print job at all. The only previous time I used Inkscape in vector mode was to drive an EggBot (obviously vector-only), and that used its own custom backend renderer. Also, reading between the lines of some 'print' function material in the tutorial makes me think it relies heavily on rasterization to handle printing to non-Postscript printers.