DiatomStudio / Piccolo

Piccolo is a pocket-sized stand-alone CNC platform.
www.piccolo.cc
351 stars 58 forks source link

The EPS file could be refactored to avoid the need for software on the user's end #4

Open sowbug opened 9 years ago

sowbug commented 9 years ago

There is a laser cutter at my work that we're allowed to use, but it has barely-usable, proprietary software on it. It takes PDFs and uses some crazy heuristics to distinguish vector/raster, and it always gets it wrong. Thus, the experience is:

  1. Print EPS to PDF (easy).
  2. Convert PDF to XPS (in our case, easy because an XPS converter is installed on the single Windows machine that has the copy-protected proprietary software installed).
  3. Open the XPS in the proprietary software.
  4. Realize that because we actually want to cut four different materials (MDF, 3mm acrylic, <3mm acrylic for gears, paper), the single file with four different patterns is very hard to use, as the horrible proprietary software will only cut the entire file as a single vector. Manually selecting every vector object and disabling or enabling them is tedious, and still doesn't address the problem that the proprietary software can't be configured to (for example) start cutting the acrylic at origin (0, 0).

Ideally, we'd instead have four EPS files, each representing a different type of material, and each at origin (0, 0).

Think of a user who doesn't have Adobe Illustrator (expensive), and where the online time is precious (because manually disabling vector objects is done on the same scarce machine as the laser cutter, so it's not practical to book just the cutting time on the shared laser cutter). From that perspective, the four EPS files is a more natural way to publish this project.

sowbug commented 9 years ago

I downloaded a trial of Illustrator and made the following files from the 1.1 eps: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/c12zu33fnrod59c/AAAW-dGtLIyJL_ZhqLe58ZqLa?dl=0

It would be great if the project produced these as well as part of their normal publishing process.