TOPIC: What exactly is a weed border?

I'm currently in training for computer cutting at my work but I'm learning a lot of new things on the actual website for SL, some of which I haven't actually been told about in training.

One feature I've seen mentioned a few times (and watched the tutorial for, too) is the weed border. I've tried searching it up on Google but nothing really comes up. I'm assuming it cuts a square/rectangle around the graphic to make weeding the vinyl easier, but I feel like that must be wrong because it would be just as easy to draw a square around the graphic and use that to cut around it. However if that's correct, I think I'd want to utilize this because sometimes when weeding out graphics we can accidentally cut through a letter or something and have to re-cut it, which is a pain if we're in a hurry.

So what actually is this feature? Does it do what I think or is it different? I'd love to know, because I'm trying to learn as much as possible to do my job as best I can!

Thank you!

You are correct, a weed border is nothing more than a cut line drawn around the objects' outer dimensions. You could easily do it manually. The Weed border can, however, be assigned to a keyboard short cut, and is intended to cut down on time consuming tasks. Draw square, size it, eyeball it, re-size it, etc... Weed border makes the square accurately on the first go.

Ultimately you can use what ever works best for your workflow.

The power weed is for putting weed lines "through" text and other intricate or difficult to weed objects. I type "through" since the weed line does not cut into the text, and you can adjust the offset of the horizontal line from the text.

I suspect that once you get used to using the weed and power weed, they will become second nature to use. Again, it all comes down to user preference.

Ah, thanks! I'm glad I know about this now, the lady who currently does the computer cutting doesn't use this feature but I'm going to give it a go when I take over for a few weeks - I think this would definitely speed up things while weeding!

Thanks again!

Edit: I didn't know about the power weed option either - we sometimes get very small graphics and that would save so much time - we usually do this by hand to help with the weeding but using the cutter would be much faster and accurate