The ablation processing of glass was performed by using the third harmonic of nanosecond Nd:YVO4 laser. The objective of this work was the formation of deep holes with a high aspect ratio in soda lime glass; with this purpose different ways to raster the glass surface with the focused laser beam, i.e., single line, parallel lines and orthogonally crossing lines, have been tried and the effect of different parameters as the number of lines and number of scans in the depth and inclination of the sidewalls of the hole has been analyzed. Moreover, to reduce the time consumption in the laser processing of glass plates the relationship between penetration depths and overlapping factor has been studied and an optimumvalue of scan speed has been obtained for a particular case. (C) 2008 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.