Hi Aaron
Thanks for all your dxf help! I would really like to get involved with extending Inkscapes dxf support. I would however need some guidance and I am overloaded so progress will be a little slow.
Here is what I was thinking: Following along with your feelings on the matter-
"But I think we must be careful not to forget the class of users for whom the script was originally created. I would like to retain this simple, preconfigured output option for them"
We could create another menu that just brings up: wishblade robocraft blah blah cutter etc custom
The menu items would simply bring up save-as dialogs pre-configured with the correct scaling for their device, only the custom dialog would bring up a dialog that could have variable scaling.
If other Inkscape users wanted to email me/mail me their dxf outputs and the actual outputs from their devices, I could reconfigure the scaling and we could add another menu item.
I guess I am going to have to learn a little Qcad/Autcad. However if I did this right I might be able to save others from having to learn these other Apps. This new Inkscape feature would really scratch my itch too. I am trying to get replacement parts made. If I can scan them, convert them to svg, then dxf. Then I can send off the CAD files to machine shops for quotes and fabrication. I wanted to buy a CNC mill, but you know it is just so cheap to get these shops to make stuff, that it doesn't make sense.
What do you think?-Patrick
Aaron Spike wrote:
Patrick wrote:
I am not a great programmer but fortunately I can program in Python. Do you think the dxf output from Inkscape can be made useful for standard CAD stuff? I was going to write a script with a GUI to allow people to control the scaling?
There are plenty of improvements that could be made to the dxf_outlines.py script. You can see that it is very simplistic right now. We could make the scaling configurable via the gui. We could give the user an option to perform polyline approximation of curves. (There is a simple routine for this in flatten.py. It could be improved to be both faster and more accurate. cf. http://www.cs.concordia.ca/cccg/papers/36.pdf ) And I'm sure you could think of other things. But I think we must be careful not to forget the class of users for whom the script was originally created. I would like to retain this simple, preconfigured output option for them. (This could be done by having two INX files point to the same script, one providing more configurability and the other providing a configuration equivalent to the current script.)
Aaron Spike
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