Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] truetype-tracer utility program (now with g-code) output.

I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who have downloaded
tttscale, hopefully it has proven useful. I decided to do a bit more
work on it and have now added the option to produce either a .dxf file,
or generate a gcode file directly.

This of course necessitated adding a number of additional options for:

final depth
cut increment
surface
safe z
feed rate

This is in addition to the original flags for setting the x and y offset
as well as the scale factor based on the requested x length.

Currently the gcode produced is very straight forward, in the next
version I will include code loops to reduce the overall size of the
gcode file. A word on the file size generated, if you specify a small
cut increment and a large final depth as well as a long string of a few
dozen characters, the file will become quite massive. For now I don't
see this as a major problem as normally in engraving only a few passes
are required. I am sure that someone will want to test the limits, so if
you enter something like:

truetype-tracer-dxf -f /usr/share/fonts/truetype/somefontname.ttf "Now
is the time for all good men to come to the aide of the party" |
tttscale -s -l250 -d 6 -c 0.01 -u 0.00 -r 3.0 -f400 > bigfile.ngc

You will have a file that will probably overload emc2! Why you would
want to do this is beyond me as the result would be making 600 passes of
the text!

Hope this utility is useful to some of you.

It's at http://co-japan.com/metalworking and listed as the development
version.





Mark Thomas wrote:

>
> If anyone uses Chris Radek's truetype-tracer program I have written a
> small utility which allows you to specify the length of the string
> generated in the .dxf engraving file. It's avalable for download at:
> http://co-japan.com/metalworking
> the latest version tttscale-002.c though marked as the development
> version is now ready for prime time.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Mark
>
>