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?"

Comments

Re:transitt is accurate

[transiit]

Firmware.

Anagraph had all of this stuff inside the plotter. Even a little HPGL interpreter on board, so we would literally just dump raw HPGL on the serial port and it would deal with it. It was up to the people over in the engineering department to worry about vinyl control or what direction the knife should be in and all that crap.

It's a bit analagous to postscript printers with their own interpreters working out all the hard parts of printing a document.

When I was working there, our usual debug method was to use the mode command in dos to set up the com port, then just do a "copy art.hpg com1" (or whatever. I know it involved mode and copy)

So now we just need stuff that's capable of doing nice vectorized art and will put out (or can be converted to) hpgl
I'd go look at gnuplot first, or xfig, or some other pre-existing app (they are out there) and I notice that imagemagick (convert) supports hpgl output.

-transiit