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Paul
Paul • mastodon (AP)
Making #penplotter progress. I had to stop it while it was making the title text because it was doing this weird thing where it kept lifting and dropping the pen making the curves, but all the other line work and text came out great!
#penplotter
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Paul
Paul • mastodon (AP)
This one came out a little bit better, though it was still doing the stabby pen motion for the larger text. The first time it was doing that was because it was actually like work imported from another program as opposed to simplex font text, but the second time I’m not sure of’ ‘cause that was fresh text.
Watching it draw resistors is pure joy.
One thing I have to remember to do is use all the pens on some scrap paper right before I’m about to plot - you can see the first few things it drew didn’t really come out well.
I’d really like to find some finer pens, particularly for the text.
#penPlotter #retroComputing
#retrocomputing #penplotter
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Paul
Paul • mastodon (AP)
my workflow is definitely in it's infancy.
I started by tracing a PDF of the schematic in #rhino3d making symbols as I went. I used text styles for the various sized fonts, thinking I could just change them to plotter-friendly fonts once I brought them into AutoCAD, but for whatever reason, they came in as text objects with their fonts over-ridden, so I had to use a script to make them all follow their style (otherwise I would have had to manually change the fonts for every text object).
Circles and arcs from Rhino also presented an issue - they would get drawn as multiple segments (which is what it does in AutoCAD too - they can't make 'real' curves), but there'd be a pen up/down command for every segment, which was slow, and violent, and put down way too much ink.
I may be better off doing this natively in AutoCAD, but Rhino is my day-to-day driver; I just need AutoCAD because it has the plotter driver.
#rhino3d
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paulrickards
paulrickards • mastodon (AP)
Not sure if it fits your workflow, but Inkscape will open PDF can output HPGL.
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Paul
Paul • mastodon (AP)
oh interesting, thanks! Can it output HPGL to a serial port natively, or do I have to do something clever with cat or pipes (which might be goofy in Windows). Can it set things like pen speed or other plotter-specific optimizations? The (only) nice thing about using AutoCAD is the plotter driver is super mature.
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paulrickards
paulrickards • mastodon (AP)
Not that I'm aware of. Support is pretty basic when I last checked in that it outputs to a file and uses pen 1 with default velocity. You'd then need to send it to the serial port yourself. A simple Python script or even CoolTerm could do that easily.
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Jonathan Neuhauser
Jonathan Neuhauser • mastodon (AP)
No, the Plotter extension (bundled with Inkscape releases) automatically sends the exported HPGL via serial port. It’s in the Extensions -> Export submenu.
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paulrickards
paulrickards • mastodon (AP)
Oh cool! I've only ever done it via the Save As dialog.
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Andy Piper
Andy Piper • mastodon (AP)
I usually go Inkscape SVG -> DrawingBotv3 -> export HPGL -> send to plotter using chiplotle3. Interested in different ways to lace it together!
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Paul
Paul • mastodon (AP)

Someone on Instagram pointed out that autodesk truview could also talk to plotters. They also pointed out some of the pen up/down issues I was having were potentially due to lineweight settings. I seem to have worked around that, but some issues remain:
- single line fonts from Rhino turn into filled in objects (text along the top)
- text object in rhino (where it makes polylines from input text) mostly works, but the translation from arc to segments makes way too many points, and even though the pen isn’t lifting and dropping anymore, it’s going really slowly around the curves and they get saturated.
- my black pen situation is pretty bleak. For whatever reason, the blue ones are taking to refills a lot better than the black ones.

For text, going through AutoCAD and using their plotter friendly fonts has still yielded the best results so far.

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