These are tools I use to manage a digital design workflow for garment
and bag making. These tools may be useful if you are trying to deal
with any modern HPGL-compatible plotter/cutter. At the time of
writing, this project does not plan to offer general HPGL parsing,
comprehension, or emulation. I use the excellent hp2xx software
during development and testing to transform HPGL to something
viewable. If you want rasterization or format transforms, I recommend
that.
The majority of my tools are designed to work with the .plt plotter
output from the CLO3D softgoods CAD program, and are not tested with
any other inputs. This means that I rely inherently on the
indiosyncrasies of that output, especially for effects such as
transformations, repetitions, and rewriting. While the .plt files
certainly appear to contain standard HPGL, these tools are not
written as general HPGL processors, and may require adaptation to
function with your input files.
Finally, the tools that interact directly with the cutter/plotter are not appropriate for use with vintage plotters. They assume modern machines with relatively large buffer memories compared to both vintage machines and the actual HPGL input files processed.
These tools are written mostly in python3, and exclusively for Linux. Some of them are OS-agnostic and will probably work anywhere, but many have dependencies you may find annoying to fulfill on a Windows machine. Tools interacting with plotter hardware are most assuredly not cross-platform, as they work with serial ports in a naively unix-centric way.
If a script errors out trying to find a package, use pip3 to satisfy
the dependency. You may need to add -dev packages from your system's
package manager in order to satisfy some build requirements for
the Kivy UI library used in mark_cuts and other graphical tools.
If you have no idea what I'm talking about and can't find out with google, I'm afraid these tools are probably not friendly enough for you to use without assistance. I would recommend finding a tech to help you.
[Note: This process is under development, and some aspects of this description are... uh... aspirational.]
So that the context of these tools is clear, I will describe my process for working with fabric.
I first design the item in pattern-making software. In particular, I use CLO3D; but in principle there's nothing prohibiting another CAD program, or even image capture with a vectorization pass run on it. The key point is that the design software will output a text file containing HPGL plotter commands describing the pattern pieces to be cut from fabric.
I then use a wide-format "vinyl cutter" for the rest of the process. Typically used in signmaking shops, this is effectively a very large, roll-fed plotter designed to drag a blade like an X-Acto knife across a thin sheet material with a very controllable pressure to cut the film but leave the carrier paper. These cutters are incredibly precise and repeatable, and can exactly retrace their path over and over again without perceptible error. This can allow tougher materials to be cut with several light passes, reducing the chance of the material wrinkling or dragging with the knife.
Instead of dragging the knife, the machine can be easily refit to carry an inkpen insert, making a mark instead of a cut. In general, the pen carriers are designed to fit ballpoint style refills. But they can often be modified to accomodate popular fabric pens of different designs.
Given a sufficiently wide vinyl cutter, fabric can be marked for
cutting on the whole cloth, unrolled directly from the bolt. This makes
it quite convenient to cut the pattern just by following the lines
with shears. When working with CLO3D outputs, I use mirror_plot to
flip the pattern and plot it on the wrong side of the fabric so that I
can leave guidelines and panel outlines inside of the seam allowance
cutlines.
Fabric can also be cut with the machine, although this requires substantially more prep work. A length of fabric long enough to contain the entire pattern must be cut, then glued to a backing material with a temporary adhesive. At present, I'm experimenting with embroidery stabilizer and kraft paper as potential backings and basting spray as the adhesive. The entire laminate stack is then fed into the machine, with the blade pressure tuned so that the fabric is cut but the backing is only lightly scored. Some fabrics may work better than others, and some fabrics may work better with multiple light cutting passes. Pattern pieces are then peeled off the backing for assembly.