Ruby: Design Screen

Once you open the design in Design Screen you should see the artwork you've created. You will be able to see artboard size, as well as all the colours and lines were all retained.

Screenshot of Ruby in the design screen showing our file

The design screen is split into 3 columns:

Toolbar

Screenshot with annotations of all the toolbar options in Ruby

Fit to Design

As we created the whole design in Illustrator already the only thing we would probably want to do is reduce the size of the artboard to the design.

We could do this in Illustrator but Ruby offers a tool to do it automatically by selecting "Fit to design" in the toolbar which will prompt you for a margin size, we'll leave this as 0.00mm and click "Fit to design":

Screenshot of the Fit to Design pop up window

After you'll see the white area of your artboard has been made to perfectly fit the design we created, this might seem like a simple task, but it makes it easy to tightly pack multiple designs onto a piece of material.

Screenshot of the outcome of the Fit to Design function

Check your layers

As we've already setup the original file with 3 primary RGB colours and it's a simple design there should be 3 layers.

Layers are different in Ruby to most drawing packages, they're basically a way of defining multiple tasks for the laser cutter, for example:

  1. Etch the black area
  2. Engrave the blue line
  3. Cut the red line

Screenshot of the Layers area of the design screen

Changing colours / Merging layers

If any object is the wrong colour you can select it by clicking the object on screen or in the layers, you can select multiple by pressing Command or Control and clicking each object. Or you can select all objects in a layer by pressing the tickbox next to that layer in the layers area.

Once you've selected the object(s) you can change the colour by selecting from those listed:

Screenshot of layer colour picker

Create Job

Once the design(s) are complete you can click "Create Job" to move to the Prepare Screen.

Screenshot of Create Job button in Ruby


Revision #9
Created 28 February 2022 23:06:59 by Tom Lynch
Updated 21 December 2023 23:41:07 by Tom Lynch