How to Change MM to Inches in Lightburn

For those of you who live in the US and still use the imperial measuring system, I’m going to show you how to toggle between millimeters and inches using Lightburn.

Watch the video below or scroll down

Lightburn defaults to millimeter. When you come into the screen you will notice that the width and height, and the grid line measurements are all in metric.

Golly gosh, even the measurements in the library are in millimeters.

However, it’s pretty simple to change from millimeters to inches in Lightburn

So to show how this is done, I’ve drawn a Square on the screen measuring approx five inches by seven inches. It’s only for demonstration purposes so it the size doesn’t matter.

At the moment the measurements are showing mm.

What you need to do is come up to the menu bar and you’ll see this icon.

If you don’t actually see that little icon it probably means is that your window is not stretched out enough. When you condense your window you tend to lose sight of some of the options. So just stretch the window out it appears.

All I need to do now is click on it and the option changes to inches. You will notice that everything has changed. All measurement options in the menu are now in inches, the grid line measurements and even our library are all in inches as well.

So now I can just change my width to five by seven inches. And I can just toggle back if I want to change back to millimeters.

Now you can also change from millimeters to inches up in the settings

If I click on the settings icon a pop-up appears and you’ll notice the Units and Grids section.

It will depend on what sort of laser you’re using if you’re using a CO2 you need to choose the Better for CO2 option.
I will select the Better for Diode option as we have a diode laser.

We generally use millimeters per minute but now you can change it to inches per minute.
Once I change my selection to inches/min and click OK, you’ll notice that everything changes to inches, including the library.

Note: Doing this will also change our speed and power settings.

If I double click on it you can see now it says speed inches per minute

Now I really like using millimeters per minute but I also like using inches for my projects.

So how do we get around that?

We come back to the settings
and you’ll see a third option that says inches/mm/min

Okay so basically what it’s saying it’s going to use inches for the measurements but it’s going to use the millimeters per minute for the speed and power.

So what does this mean?

When I select the third option and again okay, what happens is we now have inches showing for our measurements but in the Speed/ Power section we have millimeters per minute.

Now that’s exactly what I’m after.

So you can choose the best option for you and for what you like working with.

Lightburn really is an amazing tool for laser users.