Gregory's Serverplaying around with Inkscape and my HP pen plotter. it's not really going that well; Inkscape has severe issues with locating the origin, scaling factors, and can't handle things like crosshatching. these are problems that were solved 40 years ago.
 22 comments
OK so i downloaded 1.3 and installed the crosshatch plugin from the plugin manager. this seems normal and expected.  i removed that "plugin" and manually installed the axidraw extensions. why axidraw? it has a hatch plugin as well! problem: this is what it does. you have to turn off "connect nearby ends" because it doesn't do right angle corners for some reason, only smooth swoopy corners. it's an HP 7550, probably the fastest pen plotter ever made. 🤯 This is 50cm/sec. it can go to 60cm/sec with a ballpoint rather than a fiber tip pen.   @tubetime Gotta put some markers in my wife's CriCut and see how it does.   @tubetime My dad is a mechanical engineer and had these huge A0 plotters at home. Fascinating machines but slow so he jumped on A3 laser printers when they became an option (late 80’es I think)    @tubetime Yeah, great "little" machine, got one, too, which still needs a lot of TLC. One day.... But then again, 50 cm/s is rather pedestrian. I also have a DraftMaster RX (7596C), basically the last pen plotter HP made. That one gets up to 110cm/s. Putting a ball pen in there and see it fly is mesmerizing!    Bob, the reverse is also true, any 3D printer can technically be a plotter if you replace the nozzle with a pen holder   @tubetime as someone who has put a lot of hours into programmatically converting Inkscape-generated vector art into other formats, sometimes I can't tell whether Inkscape is underdeveloped or very opinionated. I love it. It's an amazing piece of software for $0. Unfortunately, that also means everyone uses it for everything, and it's not great at everything.  |
and yes i'm aware of the crosshatch plugin for inkscape, but it hasn't been ported to 1.4 yet.