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Re: gEDA-user: Design changs required to mill PCBs?



Dave N6NZ wrote:


Dave McGuire wrote:

On Oct 4, 2006, at 6:48 PM, Robert Fitzsimons wrote:

Do you still have the code? would you share? I have an old plotter and
learned some HPGL years ago, even wrote some simple plotting tools. Now I
would use HPGL as an example exporter with the scriptable PCB project.


I didn't see a response from Dave, but I've attached the code wrote to
work with my plotter last year.  It is able to convert a DXF file to
HPGL format.


Sweet, that looks like it'll be handy. :-) I'm still looking for my old code; it's on one of about a hundred tapes. I know I have it, I'm just not sure where!


Ok, it's getting pretty late in the day, so I had better ask my bone-head question of the day if I'm going to get it done.


Is HPGL at all like PCL? I'm not very familiar with printer languages other than Postscript. The reason I ask is that the Epilog laser cutter to which I will soon have access is rumored to run on slightly tweaked PCL5. Epilog does not publish specs, but some work has already been done to reverse engineer the protocol, and from what I gather it is mostly PCL5.


I can't really speak about PCL, but HPGL is quite simple. Remember it was developed for pen plotters so the commands are things like (not using the real HPGL syntax but rather the meaning of the command) "select pen #1", "pen up", "pen down", "draw a line from here to there", etc.


The book "The HP-GL/2 Reference Guide" from HP is a pretty easy read.

Perhaps someone else can give some tips on PCL5.

-Dan


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