Don't understand CC Boolean functions

I have used many software applications and cannot seem to make sense of how this feature is intended to be used in Carbide Create. I have some very simply geometry that I imported as SVG and now simply trying to group these various features together. All I want to do is to punch out the holes in the lettering so that it is all one entity. The reason is if I try to center the whole works, it treats every entity as a separate thing and then jumbles them altogether in a clump. Yes, I’ve tried selecting both entities with the CTRL key, and then every combination of the 3 available Boolean operations…UNION, INTERSECT and SUBTRACT…none of which perform what I want it to do.

As imported from CorelDraw.

Everything selected and centered to the stock (no good obviously).

CorelDraw allows objects to be created which don’t respect the winding rule for PostScript (when following the path, the left should be towards the fill) — this may be confusing it.

It also looks as if you have multiples of some paths (the bottom counter in o, the counter in e)

I believe that if you clean up / optimize this to make it a single compound object w/ correct path direction it will then “just work” in Carbide Create — wash the SVG through Inkscape which does afford tools to fix this sort of thing. If you wish, you could post it here and I’ll take a look at it and see what’s involved in fixing it and write down those specifics.

Here is the original file (EPS).

love.zip (304.6 KB)

Okay. I was able to make this work by:

  • opening in Inkscape
  • ungrouping Object | Ungroup
  • Path | Break apart
  • select all
  • shift-click on the outer-most path to deselect it
  • set fill colour to white
  • Path | Combine
  • select all
  • Path | Difference
  • scale to 50%
  • save as SVG
  • import into Carbide Create
  • select all and position as desired
  • create toolpath as a Pocket

love.c2d (1.1 MB)

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