Another option here would be to use a tool which directly accepts SVGs ---
one free/opensource tool for that is PartKAM/MakerCAM.
My apologies for the late response --- investigating this sort of thing
myself, though I'll likely be using a proprietary tool, Carbide Create to
drive either a Nomad or a Shapeoko.
William
On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 3:15 AM, Hans Hagen
On 6/29/2016 10:49 PM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
On 29 June 2016 at 14:12, Hans Hagen wrote:
On 6/29/2016 12:31 PM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
Hi,
I want to play with CNC and don't yet have any experience with CAD software (nor the licence for the expensive ones) other than perhaps some Blender, so I decided to try to use the super ugly route with metapost -> svg -> dxf -> g-code for the first time.
I have a few questions.
(1) I love Hans' shortcuts in metafun, but I seem to remember that things like input metafun; or perhaps input mp-tool; used to work, so that I don't have to remember to use mpost -mem=metafun my-drawings.mp when compiling the graphics.
Did the method with "input" ever work (or is it supposed to work)? Now I'm getting a bunch of weird errors. I would love to specify everything in the source file and then just call mpost. If that doesn't work, that's fine, I can still add "-mem=metafun", but ...
input metafun.mpiv ;
How should one properly compile that file then to get the SVG?
some mp directive (but i never tried) as i always just use \startMPpage .. \stopMPpage so that fonts etc work ok too
Using just "mpost something.mp" doesn't work that way.
(2) I guess that using "raw metapost" is the only sane way to generate
SVG. If I use metapost inside ConTeXt that's probably not going to work, right?
(3) Is there any way to convince the SVG output mode to generate something like
why not just
\startMPpage whatever you want \stopMPpage
and then use mudraw (mutools) to go from pdf to svg (that's what i do when i need svg)
Given that metapost supports SVG natively I imagined that it would produce a simpler/cleaner output. Thanks a lot for the suggestion, I'll test it.
the svg from pdf is normally quite simple as it just output the same paths, colors etc + text as outline
It turned out that the (opensource) tools I used for converting SVG
into DXF gives very weird result, so I have to change the other parts of the "toolchain" as well.
Nevertheless, the question about whether one could convince MP to output true units in cm/mm/in.--
no, but you can of course scale the whole lot just before shipping so that units represent cm
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