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This has been posted in a few topics but they’ve since gone quiet, so thought I’d start a dedicated support topic in the hope one of the Inventables team can pick up on this one and help us out.
I’m still having problems importing some SVGs into Easel. Several elements of the svg are being moved when they are imported and since it’s impossible to accurately put them back in Easel, I can’t carve that project.
I have tried re-doing the svg from scratch, saving as plain, optimised etc. but no change. Opening and saving in MakerCAM does seem to fix it but I need greyscale fills and MakerCAM doesn’t support this.
I am using Inkscape, but have also tried other software. I have tried grouping but no change. This is a relatively recent problem I think, last few months only.
I’ll have a go at replicating it with a simpler file later but here’s one for now… The issue seems to just be in the bottom right corner and right hand side. Thanks for having a look, really can’t figure this one out!
I just found something. When I open this file in easel from my computers, it’s all messed up. I saved my own file above to my desktop and opened in easel fine. Running it through another save seemed to fix it.
As far as I can tell there’s something odd with the way Easel imports the different styles of vector in an .svg.
.svg files are laid out in a similar way to a webpage, in that it calls an object, then defines the traits of that object. There are object types for rectangles, ellipses, polygons, etc.
Near as I can tell, Easel doesn’t like it when you have polygon objects that don’t have any curves in them.
The workaround I’ve found is to round the corners of your object to the minimum radius it allows (in Illustrator it’s .004").
This won’t have an impact on how the file is carved since you’re likely using bits that are bigger than that anyway, but it does change the (polygon) elements into (path) elements, which Easel can render properly.
That’s an interesting point as the shapes I’ve got misbehaving all have non-rounded nodes on them as they have been cropped to fit a boundary border. I’m not sure how to round them like that in inkscape but it’s worth a try.
If I save my file having uploaded it to the forum it’s even worse than before with some areas just disappearing! Something fishy going on here!
I’m starting to think the problem is the SVG file format itself. It doesn’t seem very robust if it can change depending on how it’s opened / moved around.
I can open a big file in makercam in a couple seconds. The same file in Easel will chug away and sometimes crash the browser. Nothing like getting the “oh snap” message from chrome.
I’m curious what the team thinks about the performance of Easel and if that is something they are looking at internally. There is a definite, repeatable issue with Easel and .svg files.
I’ve got a pretty stout pc with 16gb of ram. And Easel crashes the browser.
Well I actually managed to figure out a workaround for that project now but it’s not ideal! I combined all elements with the same fill on the same layer into one object, then when I loaded into Easel I still had the same problem but it was easier to move all the elements back as they had a common zero point (bottom right). This wouldn’t work for other svgs I have that are not importing correctly though.
Thanks for trying but no change sorry. Somehow uploading it here has lost some other info too and added some full depth cut areas that weren’t there before!
yep, those are new… when I import the file that I made it works fine, but when I import the file that I uploaded here it gets those cuts, but it is interesting that they are all for the same depth level around the map…
But that doesn’t help Al. Is it possible that this is a grouping issue within the SVG that is getting clobbered between export from one tool and import into another? There isn’t a Z order in SVG so it’s usually accomplished by grouping elements.
If you grouped all your 90% depth elements together with a tiny circle at 0,0 for reference, then your 80% depth elements again with reference circle etc.
Are they in the same position as how they are when opening in another application like Illustrator or Inkscape, or do they actually shift during the import?
but it’s not ideal! I combined all elements with the same fill on the same layer into one object, then when I loaded into Easel I still had the same problem but it was easier to move all the elements back as they had a common zero point (bottom right). This wouldn’t work for other svgs I have that are not importing correctly though.
