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

Vinyl sign making

[transiit]

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

You really need specialized software

[c]

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.