Hi all,
This is my first post here, but I intend to become regular.
Just discovered inkscape last week after being a commercial user of coreldraw for almost 15 years.

I can easily say that inkscape has about everything I need.

I only have 1 problem and it has to do with my purpose of using inkscape.
I want to design paths that should be cut by a lasercutter.

The best way for me to do this is by being able to save my vectors to HPGL or PLT format.

Inkscape has this capability, but I find 1 big problem with it.


In lasercutting, when exporting from a package, you have to be able to specify pens.

For example. A green pen and a red pen color. green means just engrave lightly so you get a line and red means cut all the way through.

In coreldraw you could export to hpgl/plt with different pens. For example red lines were exported as pen 1 and green lines as pen 2.

In inkscape it looks like you can only export to 1 pen number? In that case the program which will read the plt has absolutely no way to know if a line was an engrave or a cut line???


Would anyone know if there is a possible solution to this problem? Maybe some other way of exporting my data?



The only thing that is really needed is that I need to be able to export the paths to plt/hpgl but being able to see pen numbers or maybe just the color of the line in some format like #RRGGBB . That way I can convert easily.


Kind regards,

Bart

Welcome Bart!

I'm not familiar with the use of cutter/plotters, and had never saved anything as HPGL or PLT before. But I thought, what the heck, try it. Plus, I don't have to go through with the save. I just want to see the export dialog (HPGL Output dialog). So there I see several options, one of them is Pen number. I seem to be able to enter from 1 to 10. Is that what you mean? (I tried Save As PLT, but Inkscape crashed (Uniconverter failed)).

Oh....you mean that you need 2 Pen Number options?

If that's not the solution, then you certainly can color the lines "manually". Just select the path, hold Shift, and click any color on the palette, or use Object menu > Fill and Stroke > Stroke Paint tab, to create a custom color. If you'll always be using the same color, you could even create a custom palette (look into Swatches http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL ... omSwatches).

I'm not sure if I've really answered your questions. But I hope I've come close enough to be of some help.

Hi thanks for answering. I meant that for example red lines should export as pen1 and green lines as pen 2 etc.

I'm currently looking into gcodetools extension for inkscape. It looks like that tool could be my solution which would rock

Hi Bart,
did you solve your problem? Please post your solution, I'm very interested, because I have the same problem.
Annother problem I have is, that the pen speed can not be specified.
Reinhard

Welcome Reinhard,
I don't know why I didn't think of this before. But the extension in this topic might help both you and educa (op) viewtopic.php?f=31&t=4987