Thankyou Jordan,
yes, I was trying to carve a heart with text at the bottom. I am aware of what the four carve types are/mean, however, for love nor money I could not get the software to accept the carving out a pocket. with much expermentation and deleting re-importing-deleting, etc… I somehow bumbled upon making it allow me to carve the pocket. It was during this series of frustrations that prompted my question concerning the carve choices upon import, and the carve choices from the cut drop-down menu.
As previously mentioned, they have different names, thus my confusion. While on the phone with Inventables Tec Support, I learned that despite their different names, they are in fact the same (I put in a future request that they eliminate this confusion by adapting standard language for both sets of carve instructions).
moving on
during my initial test cut, many various problems arose - some that had plagued me in previous projects (pocket cuts in steps, and detail bit does not match those steps leaving a strange ‘ridge’ along the bottom, text not carving (the bit remains a mm above the surface despite ‘beleiving’ that it is carving, and I had to manually lower the bit by opening the collet grab the bit, pull it down, and retighten, then when it does a through carve, it goes too far and cuts a 1/8" into the waste board, etc… with the biggest PIA being that on the outside ‘cut-through’ the system somehow thought that I wanted to cut on the other side of the shop, and the gantry was slamming against the stops making all sorts of noise as it tries to carry the spindle off of the machine - slamming into a clamp and breaking a bit in the process).
I accept that much of the problems are operator error (if there is such a thing in an ‘intuitive’ software - which I believe is an impossible dream - AI save me!!)).
Anyway, I went with the old standby - HARDBOOT the system and try again.
after several fails and disasters, I ended up with a heart shaped bowl with carving inside (it was suggested that I do not trust the software and machine to do that lettering carve at the bottom of the pocket based on surface measurements (ODD to say the least), and instead I did this project as five separate projects, measuring from the bottom of the pocket to make that carve.
in the end, I got a heart-shaped bowl with carving at the bottom, and discovered in the process that there is much work to be done in easel on the part of the designers before such a project could be mass produced for a profit (no project that requires five separate carves to complete could ever be profitable), so for the time being, I will abandon this project as a potential income source.
back to the learning curve to learn how to do inlays… already ran into a question with that this morning and am awaiting a call back from Tec Support (mainly, what cut choice is needed when importing an image, text, etc… in order to use the inlay app???). again, ‘Intuitive software’ is - at least at this point - an impossible dream. So, my learning continues.