Oh, Illustrator. Why must simple tasks be so complicated? We don't use Lightburn for our laser cutter and instead stack different layers on top of each other in the proprietary printer software. Works fine for the most part, but it does mean we need to separate engrave, cut and score files. It's supposed to ingest multi-layered files but I've always run into problems where random artifacts would be introduced.
Layers are wonderful to use in Illustrator and make organization a breeze. Unfortunately, separating engrave and cut files that need to stack perfectly on top of each other becomes a bit difficult when you realize you can't group objects on different layers! Well...you can, but Illustrator will move your objects into a sub-layer!
Take this wonderful plate tectonics activity provided by Ms O-C, our sage head of science:
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| This Dynamic Planet Teaching Companion Packet |
Illustrator did a fine job image tracing the landforms and scanning the fossil trail. Smoothed to a max 4% and some paths simplified. I had to look up a pangea diagram because I couldn't figure out some connections! Landforms were coloured red and placed on a separate layer from the fossil trail engravings:
However, if you try to group Greenland's landform cutlines with it's engraving it'll move both of them to a new sub-layer in cut. Argh! I feel like this can actually be done but I was already finished with the project and I didn't want to keep googling for a solution (though most results seem to actually "objects will stay on their layer when grouped!" even though that wasn't the case for me.
In this case it wasn't too much effort to leave it be and just re-arrange things manually. Cut on 1/4" birch:
