Inkscape

Inkscape not talking to Trotec anymore

Asked by Deborah Orlik

We've been using Inkscape .91 and .92 on Lenovo running Windows 10 for at least 6 months with our Trotec Speedy 360 and 400 machines. Last Monday, both machines (simultaneously) no longer see the "255 red, .3 px" cutline from Inkscape. Everything is seen as an engrave.

We tried reloading Inkscape. (We went up one version and, when that didn't solve the problem, we went back to the version that was working before.) We updated Trotec software. No joy.

Oddly, over the week we discovered many different "fixes" that would work once (like changing stroke to .01 px or other stroke width that cannot be seen on the screen) and then never work again. We discovered that Inkscape was not holding onto "Linked Color Profiles" so we tried linking sRGB IEC61966-2.1... but we don't know that this is the correct profile and we don't know that it was holding the color profiles before.

We discovered a bug report about python so we reloaded python but we're still getting the same error. The problem (again) is that we don't know if we had that error message before last Monday.

Windows updated January 4 but our problem did not manifest until January 14th.

Trotec spent hours on the phone with us but could not help. They admitted not knowing much about Inkscape.

Ideas?

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Hachmann (marenhachmann) said : 		#1

How do you send the data from Inkscape to the plotter(? or which type of machine is this)?

Can it use files?

Have you tried using files if it can? Old ones and new ones?

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Deborah Orlik (dorlik) said : 		#2

Thanks so much for your questions!

We are printing on two Trotec laser cutter/engravers (one is Speedy 360; the other is Speedy 400). From Inkscape (or Corel or AI), one simply uses the "Print" command and the Trotec shows up as a printer.

The old files that were sitting in Trotec's job queue (ones that had already cut successfully) continued to show as "255 red .3 px" cut files and continued to engrave and cut correctly. However, old files that had printed properly that were just sitting on the computer did not print properly when imported into Trotec after last Monday. (I'm calling it Mystery Monday.)

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Hachmann (marenhachmann) said : 		#3

Does it work when you export the file to pdf, and print that pdf from another application?

From your description, I would suspect it is a Windows issue. Inkscape doesn't do any auto-updates, but who knows what Windows is doing in the background...

Have you tried it with an older Windows version, maybe on a virtual machine?

I would probably also make sure that work machines that are essential do not go online, and would probably 'freeze' them when they work.

Would those plotters work with Linux? It looks like they can read postscript, so they should be working universally on all operating systems (unless settings must be made via some kind of incompatible software).

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Deborah Orlik (dorlik) said : 		#4

Hachmann,

Thanks very much for your suggestions. Unfortunately, Linux is not an option for us.
Right now we are converting to PDF and using Corel Draw to send files to the laser cutter.

I would very much like to cut down on the number of steps to use the machine. Does anyone else have any ideas?

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#5

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.