Hi, Am Donnerstag 14 Juni 2007 schrieb Paul Fox: > wow. when someone brings up a tool as arcane (these days!) as > xfig, i have to come out of lurking mode. :-) I know, that xfig is very old. But that's imho an advantage as it basically does what i want. There isn't a huge set of functionality that cannot be mapped to a carving. E.g. there are no shading effects or the like. Thus the typical xfig picture will look fine when carved.
The the (for me) most apparent reason: xfig is easy to extend and there's plenty of export code in xfig i can easily re-use. Furthermore i don't have to keep pace with ongoing development as there isn't any xfig development anymore. And it doesn't need any kde nor gnome and will thus run on a nearly minimal x configuration. > i suspect i described this to the list at the time, but it was a > couple of years ago that i was doing it: are you aware of the > program "hp2xx"? (http://directory.fsf.org/hp2xx.html) Yes, i found that and have been using it like you describe. > my image take a _really_ long time to carve. long enough > that i invested many hours writing a simple gcode path optimizer Ok, that's what i've been working on today. There's already some advantage when working on the fig file as you e.g. get polygons etc as sequences of lines. Most other xfig elements are also broken down to lines. Currently even circles are made of lines (i think hp2xx also does this). I am thinking about checking if a xfig circle can in fact be described in a correct way using gcode and use g2/g3 codes if possible, but i haven't done that yet. My optimizer currently just sorts the traces and tries to insert objects using the same tool close together so you only have to mount the same tool once. And then i am trying to insert objects such that their start and end points are close to the ones of the objects handled drectly before and after. I am sure you have done something similar. > the path optimizer is here, if anyone's interested: > ftp://ftp.foxharp.boston.ma.us/pub/pgf/cnc/ I'll definitely take a look at it. Ciao, Till ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
