Ooh, I see. It's just that loading suddenly started taking longer than it did at first, and now you just see a notification that loading is happening. You'll have to forgive me. We're used to people giving us sketchy information (such as, literally sometimes, "this doesn't work") and we have to extract details from them. We're not used to people giving us so much detail, haha.
So there is no error message, it just takes longer, and the contents are for some reason, being altered, just by....you're either importing them into Silhoutte or opening in Silhouette. Right?
In Silhouette's FAQ I found under: "Software Crash on Initializing OR Loading Icons OR Generating Cut Job" they say to: "Delete the Folder com.aspexsoftware.Silhouette_Studio (and) Empty the Recycle Bin." I've done that twice.
No, I would not say your problem is a crash exactly. So no need to re-do those steps again. But there's definitely a problem! Is this problem where the paths are changed, happening when you convert to DXF, or when you import or open in SS? It sounds like you're saying it's happening when the DXF is loaded into SS. But I just want to be sure.
Is the file My Design Nodes.png from the My Butterfly Design.svg file? Could you give us the DXF version of the same SVG file? Like for example, since you already uploaded My Butterfly Design.svg, could you also upload My Butterfly Design.dxf? Well, it doesn't have to have the same name, but what we need is the same SVG file after it converted to DXF. The before and after, so to speak.
Ooohh..... But if this is happening when you load the DXF into SS, then you don't actually have a DXF file with the distorted paths. The PNGs you showed are from your preview in SS, aren't they? Have I got that right?
Well, it still might help to have both SVG and DXF of the same file, if you can.
I have a couple of ideas what might be happening. If the following ideas don't give you any clues to fix the problem, if you could share the DXF version of that same butterfly file, that will help.
First, everything in the butterfly SVG is grouped. As you've said, and as I would guess, groups are probably not accepted. Although I don't know what the DXF conversion does with a group, if the group survives the conversion, then possibly the group is causing these problems?
Next, see my screenshots where I have zoomed into about the same area as your PNG, added a black stroke and removed the fill color. The first one is the original file.....well actually, I'll make a video instead. I think that will be better.
Helping someone else who was using a different cutter hardware/software (a few months ago) they found that the cutter-ware was trying to correct what it thought was a problem with the file. It was adding a lot of extra and unwanted paths. If the group turns out not to be the problem, I wonder if something like that might be happening for you.
But first, one more comment. While I don't have any kind of digital cutter, I have a pretty good general idea of how things are supposed to work. The first thing I noticed in the butterfly file are a lot of paths crossed over each other. Since those paths are literally where the machine will cut, you'll have one path cutting other paths into pieces. I wonder if your cutter-wares are trying to correct that, and....well, not succeeding?
In the video, where I've made some of the paths more narrow, and zoomed in, is to show you how paths that look like they are on top of each other, are actually crossing back and forth over each other. And also where I'm pulling apart some nodes, to show some separate little subpaths, I wonder if the cutter-wares are trying to correct these things, but not very well. You can delete the extra subpaths, since they aren't needed anyway.
If the lines crossing over each other could be the problem we can help you learn how to make them perfectly aligned with each other, so the machine won't have a problem with them. If they aren't the problem let's look at the DXF file, and see if there might be some clues there.
Here's the video:
