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Vinyl Sign Cutting Software for Linux?
prpplague asks: "a large but often over looked business in the United States is that of making vinyl signs. A Windows application to do the layout and run the plotter/cutter will cost you at least $250. I've been unable to find a Unix based application that does the same thing. Anyone out there working on something to replace this business sector's dependency on Microsoft based products?"
As God is my witness, I have never seen a news day as slow as this one.
No, seriously. Gimp, from what I've seen, is highly scalable, so it should not be a problem to set up a few scripts and attach a plotter on /dev/lpr or wherever. Good luck!
This sig no verb.
"Anyone out there working on something to replace this business sector's dependency on Microsoft based products?"
I believe that XActo is working on the #11 blade, and requires no Windows products to work!
My aunt works for a sign company in California. They usually just print cardboard forms, then stack up a rather large amount of vinyl sheeting and use a laser to cut 50+ sheets at a time. the system works the same way one of those old mechanical pencil enlargers works to guide the laser. I know I am over-simplifying things, but thats basically it.
I am assuming you are doing vinyl cuts which will then be glues to metal. You didn't leave much info.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
I did a stint in technical support for a vinyl-cutting plotter manufacturer in 1996, so I can at least give a brief idea of what this is all about.
This sort of sign does not involove cutting and then glueing (as mentioned in another comment), but the use of these big rolls of adhesive-backed vinyl. You load this on to a plotter, which basically has a knife instead of a pen, and set your job going. When finished, you have to weed the unwanted portions (basically remove any vinyl that should know be a negative area) and apply the thing to a sign, glass, your car, etc.
A lot of the fancy striping on cars is done this way, and you see the vinyl sold as "laser-cut" or "die-cut" stickers (even though they don't use lasers or dies.) All those bootleg Calvin-peeing-on-whatever-stickers could be used as an example.
At least back in 96, the big manufacturers were Roland, Summagraphics, and Anagraph. (I worked for Anagraph, and those were the only other names I heard. We could've been piddly small, I never cared enough about the sign-making industry to find out.). Our plotters basically worked by hooking up to the serial port and just throwing an HPGL file at it. Nothing too hard. The *nix equivalent would be "cat art.hpgl >/dev/ttyS0'
So if you can put together a *insert your favorite vector graphics format here* to HPGL converter, it could be done. Around the time I left, they were all wetting their pants about printing other images on the vinyl before cutting, but I don't know how that works.
-transiit
That's exactly what the guy is looking for but open source or *nix based... anything that can do vectors would be a start and hpgl is definitely the output you want. The only other thing I can think it needs to do is control the feed of the vinyl.
I don't know of any software on Linux for this but it doesn't seem like a very difficult problem to solve.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
How about http://www.qcad.org this will allow you to take dxf files and output to hpgl. There are a load of hpgl gpl programs out there. Try a search on http://www.freshmeat.net for hpgl.
If you are using something like a Roland printer/plotter or a Gerber Edge you're in for a bit of trouble though. They use special print profiles for colour matching and it can be hell trying to get the colours right. Mind you haven't tryed doing it in about 6 years.
sic transit biscuitus
I didn't get very deep into vinyl printing, but it was one of the businesses that my old place of work was doing.
The machine looks like a huge plotter. Say about five feet wide. Heavy, and very tempermental about the quality of ink it drinks. You feed it white rolls of vinyl, and it will "print" whatever you want. IIRC, it was identified as a regular printer under windows, and shipped with its own control program. The output, with a good enough image, is great.
I operated a vinyl cutter for a while in the late
'80s. Quite frankly, most generic drawing tools
(vectorized or not) won't cut it (pardon the pun).
Production sign work is all about throughput. 90%
of what you do is text with maybe the odd logo.
You want to get the data and layout entered while
the plotter is doing a run so there's not a lot
of time to screw around with a UI. The simple
things have to be really simple while the
hard things have to be doable.
Most graphics tools
have a focus on making nifty effects easy, but most
of those nifty effects don't translate to cut vinyl.
Blurs, color effects, alpha channel stuff, etc are
all useless. Strong text transforms are critical,
and vectorization of pretty much everything is
good. Strong layout capabilities would be good
for reducing waste. Plotter control tools would
also be really good so you can cope with things like
running to the end of a roll halfway through a job
(or encountering a splice in the middle of a roll).
c.
Log in or piss off.
I'm not trolling, but I'm not sure I see the point here. I used to do a lot of vinyl sign work, and I don't really see the 'dependency on Microsoft products' being an issue in this sector.
... but instead to get sign software for free. Maybe you can get in touch with the maker of a piece of cheap sign software ... and offer to partner with them to do the porting to linux for them.
Typically, the sign design stations are dedicated boxes as when they're not in use designing, or driving the plotter, they're not making money. Your typical setup will cost you thousands of dollars for a good plotter - so the OS really doesn't add a lot to the total cost.
If your problem is that there isn't any free sign design software - that has nothing to do with MS. MS doesn't make ANY sign software - but most sign software is written for Windows (some Mac too).
The Roland cutter I used to work with would accept HPGL files that were sent to the serial port, so you may want to start there, but the problem isn't just getting data to the cutter. It's in having a good design program to work with to generate the information.
If your purpose is to get rid of the 'reliance on MS' then maybe you can get an older copy of FlexiSign, CASmate, or CADLink Signlab (which all started as Win3.1 apps) and get them to run under Wine.
If that doesn't suit your purpose, then it means your question was mis-stated and that your care isn't in removing a dependence on MS software
I think what is boils down to is the guy doesn't want to pay the 250 bucks. I can understand wanting to save money, but 250 isn't too bad, hell Photoshop is twice that and Macomedia Director is twice that still.
;)
Another point, this sounds like "Veritcal Market" type stuff, not too many people out there in need of the software. Odds are there aren't going to be any true out of the box Open Source products to do exactly this, you could probabaly develope one on your own in no time with a couple of things people have mentioned, but then you weigh that against the 250 it would cost to buy the software and the fact that I can't imagine the majority of "sign cutters" being super computer savvy and hence not understanding Linux or compiling their own programs etc etc, so maybe it boils down to a matter of, no it doesn't exist, most of the pieces are there, so if you need it write it. If you can write it then pay the 250 bucks.
Lastly, this is a pretty retarded "Ask Slashdot", I don't mean to troll or complain, but come on dude, a search on Freshmeat and Google would get you an answer, or have you tried Usenet, might even be a comp.signcutting (you never know
You might try seaching the NIST.gov site. They had a large program to support the developemtnt of open souce CNC software.
If your running a business where the materials are easily going to run you over $250 for each sign why worry about a $250 one-time cost. Jeez that's cheap. If you try to hack up some free software for that and it fails a couple times and messes up a sign where will your $250 savings be then? In your screwed up vinyl and wasted labour hours.
Many graphics programs will output HPGL. As an odd suggestion, you might want ot look at PCB layout programs for programs that will generate Gerber plots. Also, I seem to recall several HPGL to Gerber tools.
Let me get this straight... you're running a business & already have an expensive piece of custom hardware (the cutter/printer thing), and you're too cheap to make a tax deductable purchase of $250?
Try to think of it this way. The computer that drives the cutter is just an extension of the cutter itself. You don't have any control (or knowledge) of what is running inside the plotter, just view the design station the same way.
... but it is just a black box. It runs what it needs to run to do its job.
No it's not your preferred OS
Well a quick googling found this rather nifty site that might be of some use to you trying to shirk out of paying a measily $250.
Though I'm making an assumption that you just want something cheap (i.e. free as in beer) to respond to other posters I can perfectly understand why a Linux based plotter control system would be a good thing. Even running Windows the plotter/computer combination is a bit of a black box. If you can control that system easily and remotely it makes you workflow all that more efficient. I too have worked for a vinyl sign shop. We had a bunch of cheap Windows boxes built from crap found at computer fairs. I rigged up a thinnet network between them all so we could send finished files to the plotter box and print from there. It could be a pain sometimes working with Windows and its flakiness.
If I were setting up now and found find decent control programs for the plotters we used in Linux I'd strap a little Linux box to the plotter's stand and stick an Ethernet cable in it. From there you just need to mount a SMB or AFP mount from your design stations (running Windows or MacOS respectively) and then have a script on the Linux system chroned to scan the shared directory and if it finds any HPGL files to print them out. Most print shops have their proofing RIPs set up in this fashion. You just save to a network share and the RIP scans that folder looking for files to print out. It makes it pretty easy to use any design program and any RIP software because there is no need to low level communications, all they need to understand is PS. A design station/plotter server would be the same with HPGL instead of PS.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
... did the cool-ass machine in Kafka's "The Penal Colony" run Linux or Windows?
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Note: I'm a big Linux fan. But sometimes you just have to run Windows for something.
Nuke XP and install Windows 2000. W2K is FAR more stable than XP, esp. on Dell laptops. (I just got an Inspiron 8200 - OMG it sucked under XP, runs great with W2K or Linux)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I've got a low milage calcomp 1038 and it _should_ be able to accept a vinyl cutter assembly. Do you have any info on where to get one?
I use to drive that plotter from DOS and I do have the low level drivers. I also did some neat things like creating a virtual pen number where I could assign the nib width to the pen via a table. Widest I tested was about 1/4" with a 0.010" real nib. The software just calculates however many passes are required to draw what a nib of the desired width would lay down. This is done in the low level drivers so I could link it into any software I wanted. At the time I was using the MCS contouring software out of Tulsa.
Anyway, I figure I can write what I need rather quickly and at this point basically I'd need to know what the problem is. Maybe we should put out heads together.
Linux is not a problem AFAIK. I drove that plotter from HP3000, DOS, OS/2 and from a lot of other mini's so I just can't see it really being a problem.
As for HPGL - that is really easy. I have HPGL drivers too so again I think the problem really is knowing what you need.