Pens and hatching

Burn parameters in Zenom follow the model EzCad operators already know: 12 pens per document, hatching per object — but with layered fills, preset libraries and a laser-path simulation built into the dialog.

Pens

• 12 pens per document, stored in the project file. A pen bundles marking speed, power, frequency, pulse width (on MOPA sources), laser on/off and polygon delays, jump settings and Wobble.
• The pen panel edits the active pen live — changes apply to its objects immediately, no OK/Apply round-trips.
• New documents start with a practical palette: a baseline pen plus named presets for typical jobs (polishing, deep engraving, annealing, plastics and more) instead of 12 blank slots.
• Pen preset library with search, material and notes fields — build your own base of proven modes; EzCad .lib import brings an existing parameter library over in one step.
• Objects of a disabled pen are skipped — the EzCad semantics; before marking, Zenom warns about pens set to zero power.
• Wobble — beam oscillation along the trajectory for a wide line without hatching, with diameter and pitch control.
• Inert fields are honest: parameters that the pipeline does not send to the controller yet (point mode, End Comp, fly speed) say so in a tooltip instead of silently doing nothing.

Hatching

• Five patterns: unidirectional, bidirectional, ring (spiral to the center), optimized bidirectional (serpentine along the contour edge, fewer jumps) and Gong (skips voids inside a scan line).
• Multi-layer: each object carries a list of hatch layers — every layer has its own pattern, angle, spacing, repeat count and its own pen. A classic setup: fill at 0°, cross-fill at 90° with another pen, then a finishing contour pass.
• Cross hatch, follow-edge outline, edge offset, contour rings before the fill, even distribution of line spacing, line reduction, start/end trimming and per-pass auto-rotate of the fill angle. The fine-tuning pair — start/end offsets and auto-rotate repeat semantics — is implemented and still going through final on-machine verification against EzCad references.
• Per-glyph text hatching: every letter fills independently, its counters stay holes — italics included.
• Mark Contour with contour-first or hatch-first order.
• Presets store the whole setup — layers, parameters and pens — shared across documents; the dialog reopens with your last-used settings.

Simulation inside the dialog

The hatch dialog previews the fill live and can animate the laser path: line order, jumps, passes — with play/pause, a progress scrubber and speed control. Finished areas dim so you can see exactly where the beam is working. Dense fills are thinned for animation with stroke-width compensation and say so explicitly; coverage always matches the real fill.

Not in Zenom

• Hatching applies to closed contours only — open lines mark as vectors but cannot be filled.
• No unified hatch across several objects as one region (EzCad AllCalc) — merge contours with a boolean union first, then hatch the result.
• No power linearization table (Power Map) — pick modes per pen, and use the built-in Material Test grid to find them quickly.