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I'm working on a custom design of the outline of some counties in kentucky and it's engraving each county with individual borders instead of as a single line. I know I could manually trace between the counties, but that's going to be a day of work. After creating a trace bitmap in inkscape, it appears to be one line, but after converting to a plt and opening in lasercut 5.3 table, the lines are separated.

Does anyone know how I could merge the two lines into one instead of two separate borders with just a click of a button?

I'm using inkscape, illustrator, and lasercut 5.3 table.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

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    Interesting question, I'm not sure we have too many familiar with Lasercut 5.3 but hope you find your answer. Is there any way this might be solved on the Illustrator / Inkscape side? We have lots of people versed in those.
    – Ryan
    Jun 26, 2015 at 21:45
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    You may have to use centerline tracing. See graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/a/25195/12941
    – Takkat
    Jun 27, 2015 at 5:42
  • Can you illustrate your problem somewhat more, preferrably with a sketch, i.e., what do you get and you want to get?
    – Wrzlprmft ♦
    Jun 27, 2015 at 6:23
  • It sounds like Lasercut is ignoring the stroke and just engraving the edges of the individual county shapes, so you wind up with the shapes separated by the thickness of the stroke. Try dropping a rectangle shape under (or over) the whole artwork, and then subtracting the county shapes from it. You should then have an object in the shape of the outlines. If Lasercut then does a trace of the object, you will have a single line. Maybe.
    – Yorik
    Jul 29, 2015 at 17:26
  • For the unlikely event that you have access to a copy of Rhino (CAD), it seems to have a function for this: "_Make2D" discourse.mcneel.com/t/…
    – AAGD
    Nov 26, 2015 at 17:53

2 Answers 2

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If each line is truly on top of each other and not overlapping at all, you should be able to select them all in Illustrator then in the menu bar go Object> Compound Path> Make (⌘+8 or CMD+8).

Hopefully this will transfer the shape over to be read as a single shape in lasercut.

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If the final county lines are right on top of each other, you can use direct select by clicking and delete sections that over lap. To speed things up, cut one county line (selection tool), and drag a marquee over offending lines with the direct selection tool, and delete, Then paste in place (cmd+shift+v) the original overlapping county. If you're worried about losing the object on the clipboard, move it to another layer and lock (this may help visually as well).

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