I’ve been in a coaster making frenzy lately and discovered wordvecotrlogo.com for some of the logo’s and artwork. I rub my hands together in glee as the thought of not having to trace bitmaps runs thru my head.
My brother loves Notre Dame so I created a simple coaster and am on to the holder artwork. I download the little fighting Leprachaun .svg file and immediately Vcarve gives me an error and says it only loaded a partial file. What gives? I load the bitmap in Inkscape and it comes out fine. I resave in Inkscape .svg format… NOPE! Same error. I monkey arround with doing the bitmap scan, but it’s too intricate. I go back and save original .svg as a .dxf file in Inkscape. BINGO! that worked! Work up a toolpath and immediately get errors with open vectors and such. I do the vector check in Vcarve and it repairs some zero length ones, but doesn’t report on open vectors.
I roll back my sleeves and dig into the morass that is that little fighting dude. I start seeing vectors running on top of each other, around each other and who knows what else. I find the open vectors and with some node editing, merge it into surrounding ones. That’s when I discover some of the neat tools Vcarve has for “merging” vectors. Sometimes that doesn’t work out well as a large part of my drawing disappears as VC was trying to optimize things. I guess you could call removing half my vectors optimizing. 
Anyways, I end up having to do a combo toolpath to get the whole thing to look like what I want. A VC toolpath along with a profile (on line) toolpath gives me just about what I want.
Just because you find a .svg file doesn’t mean it’s usable for CNC porpoises as they like to have their vectors somewhat dumbed down. Many other .svg files I discovered have way too many offset vectors and I end up having to remove a bunch of them to remove clutter and such.
In a way it feels good to have hit this problem since it means I’m past the simple figuring out what a node was and how they are used.
Any other stories out there on unraveling .svg files?