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Even though it's taking some serious amount of time to figure this project out for your friend, the knowledge that you're gaining will be priceless to you in the long run. Not going to lie - that's a big project you're undertaking, but it's also exciting. Your friend understands that you're just starting out, and that's the best kind of customer there is. You're getting paid to learn. I'll be honest, sometimes I base my prices on size, sometimes on difficulty, and sometimes on difficulty of the customer. There have been times when the artwork is cut-ready, and other times where I feel like I'm spending forever to node edit it to death. What I do know, is my hard cost - the cost of the vinyl and app tape, and what I perceive as the wear and tear on all the rest of the equipment and accessories. Sometimes, I only charge then for the roll of the new color (because I didn't have it in my inventory already), and I get to keep whatever is left on the roll - which is usually the majority of it.

If you want edit-ability, the native file format always wins. Programs all work better in their native format. Sometimes things can be lost, like groups, transformations, gradients, metadata, layers, ect when exporting. If you just wanted to export to another location so you had better thumbnails, that is fine, disc space is cheap. I would think converting them all and not keeping the native format to be real bad. I keep all artwork I create in its native format. Art work I have found elsewhere I keep most of the time in the format I found it. Converting can cause data loss like I mentioned above. I even keep a back up of my artwork based on revision. A program backs up a time stamped-named file to another location each time I save the file. If I just relied on exports, I would have know way of replicating an earlier stage with reliability. Maybe you just need better thumbnails. Sage Thumbs is a windows program that does ok at adding eps and other thumbnails to windows explorer. I think it requires ghostscript be installed and in order. https://www.cherubicsoft.com/en/projects/sagethumbs If you have CorelDraw, a program called ST Thumbnails Explorer is the best thumbnail viewer I have found. It finds the installed CoreDraw and uses its engine to generate the thumbnails and also uses ghostscript. I said it is the best not in its appearance or function, but best in that it handles almost every vector format. It's just about the only one that makes reliable CDR thumbnails, but handles practically all the ones I've thrown at it, except for maybe a CAD like one or two. Xnview and XnviewMP are two others that do well. XnView is their classic viewer and XnViewMP their updated one. They also make the above SageThumbs. https://www.xnview.com/en/ Ghostscript is need for those for AI EPS and PDF. https://www.ghostscript.com Here is a Windows Explorer screen shot. With SageThumbs installed you can see eps ai svg and other formats just fine.

Let's just sweep this under the rug... move along, nothing to see here folks...

hope he got paid up front

Chalk it up to a working education.

Yeah, Well he knew i learning and he didn't know if i could do it at all, i told him I would try and i really at first didn't want to do it but we been friends 20 years and both helped each out over those years, The only shop that would do it told him $900 and no one else even would give a quote. he said he would buy a cutter and do it himself if he had to. im probably not charging him enough to be honest I'm sure i'm not. but it does give me more practice of doing stuff like this.

There is a inkscape extension that can generate puzzles. https://inkscape.org/da/~Neon22/★lasercut-jigsaw. Thing is it doesn't seem to create individual puzzle pieces. It probably could be a starting point with some boolean love. Ecut for CorelDraw as an extensive puzzle generator.

Thanks @davidb, really did not think I even hit 10 - but it is working now. Thanks again for looking into it for me. This is an important resource for me. While I most of the time cannot offer any useful suggestions - I do like to provide thanks and encouragement to those who can and do share with us.

Apparently, it's not exactly LEGAL for Eagle to have made these Golf Course tee markers for use at Trump's golf properties. The problem with the tee markers is that they stand in violation of federal law prohibiting use of official badges outside of their intended capacity, an infraction that can carry a six-month prison sentence. Per U.S. Code: Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 33, Section 713 Now, THAT'S the ultimate copyright violation! Joseph Bates, owner of Eagle Sign and Design, posted the photo above (since removed from their website after this story broke) and told the Courier-Journal. “We just did what our customer wanted.”