[scorch]

...the program just stalls out. I'm assuming I am just asking too much of the program...

When F-engrave runs on a large design or a lot of text the display will stop updating. Generally F-engrave will continue the calculations and resume normal operation after it has finished. I have run v-carve calculations that have takes almost 30 minutes to complete. My best advice is to be patient and wait it out. I save my work before I run any v-carve calculations that I think will take a long time so I don't loose my work if I get sick of waiting. Then save the g-code file again after calculation is complete.

Making multiple smaller output files is also a good idea if F-Engrave really is freezing up. Using the origin setting will help break up the text into two parts pretty easy. On the first half of the lines set the origin to the bottom of the text (Bot-Left, Bot-Center or Bot-Right). Then for the second half of the lines set the origin to the top of the text (Top-Left, Top-Center or Top-Right). This way your zero position on your cnc machine can remain in the same place for the two sets of text.

Scorch

[caffeinatedjoe]

The file I am trying to generate gcode for is actually a dxf from Inkscape. It seemed easier to format the text in Inkscape, but maybe dxf files require more computation than the native text in F-Engrave. Is that the case? I'm not 100% on how the whole thing works, but since both the text and the dxfs are treated as vector graphics I believed that an equivalent shape (a "T" entered in F-Engrave vs a "T" of the same font exported as a dxf from Inkscape) would require the same computation. Maybe you can shed some light on that if I am mistaken.
Anyways, I started the program on a Friday afternoon on my work computer, and when I came in on Monday it was still hung up (maybe still working, but I didn't let it keep going). I tried to attach the file to this post but I keep getting an error, so just picture 146 words accross 15 lines, scaled to a square about 18 inches by 18 inches. I know computers aren't supposed to care how many calculations they do and theoretically at some point it would finish processing, but I think the program is actually freezing up, not just thinking in the background. Any thoughts on how to fix this? Or maybe fixing it isn't the solution. Maybe there is simply a size limitation that we have to work around.
About the solution you proposed with resetting the zero location, would that cause my text to stack directly on top of itself with no space in between? My understanding was that the program created a bounding box around the content and so the space above or below would be ignored.
I know I am pestering you with a lot of questions. If you want you can tell me to go jump in a creek... I know this stuff takes a lot of work. V-carve isn't free for a reason.

[scorch]

More calculation is required for text that has been put into a DXF file. The difference is that the v-carve algorithm can not determine which features are part of the current character in a DXF file so it checks every feature for every step (this is what makes it take forever). For the text typed into F-Engrave the individual characters are defined separately so F-Engrave only checks the features within each character. (Unless Check All in the v-carve settings is selected)

Your best option may be to break the text into chunks as you suggested. You do need to be careful of how the text is place as you pointed out. Adjusting the origin as I suggested might not work perfectly so you do need to double check to make sure the text is being placed as you want it.

Scorch

[scorch]

As of V0.6 F-Engrave can read Portable Bitmap (PBM) image files with the help of Potrace. I have included potrace with the windows binary distribution of F-engrave. If you are using Linux you need to install potrace for the functionality to be enabled.

Potrace is available at: potrace - sourceforge

F-Engrave 0.6 is now available at: F-Engrave

[scorch]

I have changed the v-carve algorithm to accommodate large DXF files like the one caffeinatedjoe was trying to carve. I even gave one of the Aztec/Mayan patterns a shot with F-Engrave. It took a long time for F-engrave to process ~6 hours and some of the details were lost when I carved it on my machine (I am limited to 5 inch diameter and my z-axis slipped a couple of times). I was hoping to get these changes into version 0.6 but wouldn't you know I had a moment of clarity the day after I released version 0.6. So to get the improved speed you need to download F-Engrave version 0.7.

Thanks to Vogavt for the tip on the "divide by zero" bug that slipped into version 0.5 and 0.6 :cheers:

Scorch