Vinyl Sign Cutting Software for Linux? 32
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?"
Gimp (Score:1)
Lemme see... (Score:2, Funny)
I believe that XActo is working on the #11 blade [hobbyplace.com], and requires no Windows products to work!
hmmm...... (Score:3, Interesting)
I am assuming you are doing vinyl cuts which will then be glues to metal. You didn't leave much info.
Vinyl sign making (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Printing on Vinyl (Score:2)
I didn't get very deep into vinyl printing, but it was one of the businesses that my old place of work was doing.
The machine looks like a huge plotter. Say about five feet wide. Heavy, and very tempermental about the quality of ink it drinks. You feed it white rolls of vinyl, and it will "print" whatever you want. IIRC, it was identified as a regular printer under windows, and shipped with its own control program. The output, with a good enough image, is great.
transitt is accurate (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know of any software on Linux for this but it doesn't seem like a very difficult problem to solve.
Re:transitt is accurate (Score:4, Informative)
Anagraph had all of this stuff inside the plotter. Even a little HPGL interpreter on board, so we would literally just dump raw HPGL on the serial port and it would deal with it. It was up to the people over in the engineering department to worry about vinyl control or what direction the knife should be in and all that crap.
It's a bit analagous to postscript printers with their own interpreters working out all the hard parts of printing a document.
When I was working there, our usual debug method was to use the mode command in dos to set up the com port, then just do a "copy art.hpg com1" (or whatever. I know it involved mode and copy)
So now we just need stuff that's capable of doing nice vectorized art and will put out (or can be converted to) hpgl
I'd go look at gnuplot first, or xfig, or some other pre-existing app (they are out there) and I notice that imagemagick (convert) supports hpgl output.
-transiit
You have loads of options (Score:3, Informative)
If you are using something like a Roland printer/plotter or a Gerber Edge you're in for a bit of trouble though. They use special print profiles for colour matching and it can be hell trying to get the colours right. Mind you haven't tryed doing it in about 6 years.
You really need specialized software (Score:3, Insightful)
'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.
Not sure I see your point ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Typically, the sign design stations are dedicated boxes as when they're not in use designing, or driving the plotter, they're not making money. Your typical setup will cost you thousands of dollars for a good plotter - so the OS really doesn't add a lot to the total cost.
If your problem is that there isn't any free sign design software - that has nothing to do with MS. MS doesn't make ANY sign software - but most sign software is written for Windows (some Mac too).
The Roland cutter I used to work with would accept HPGL files that were sent to the serial port, so you may want to start there, but the problem isn't just getting data to the cutter. It's in having a good design program to work with to generate the information.
If your purpose is to get rid of the 'reliance on MS' then maybe you can get an older copy of FlexiSign, CASmate, or CADLink Signlab (which all started as Win3.1 apps) and get them to run under Wine.
If that doesn't suit your purpose, then it means your question was mis-stated and that your care isn't in removing a dependence on MS software
Re:Not sure I see your point ... (Score:1)
Looks like you've identified your unseen dependency problem.
Vertical Market Product..... (Score:3, Informative)
Another point, this sounds like "Veritcal Market" type stuff, not too many people out there in need of the software. Odds are there aren't going to be any true out of the box Open Source products to do exactly this, you could probabaly develope one on your own in no time with a couple of things people have mentioned, but then you weigh that against the 250 it would cost to buy the software and the fact that I can't imagine the majority of "sign cutters" being super computer savvy and hence not understanding Linux or compiling their own programs etc etc, so maybe it boils down to a matter of, no it doesn't exist, most of the pieces are there, so if you need it write it. If you can write it then pay the 250 bucks.
Lastly, this is a pretty retarded "Ask Slashdot", I don't mean to troll or complain, but come on dude, a search on Freshmeat and Google would get you an answer, or have you tried Usenet, might even be a comp.signcutting (you never know
Re:Vertical Market Product..... (Score:2)
This segment of the open-source "community" is often overlooked.
Re:Vertical Market Product..... (Score:1)
Warez [thebugs.ws] is far more insidious than you would think (search for signgo).
Not that I would ever know where to get that sort of stuff, I just stumbled across it with this [google.ca] link.
NIST open source CNC (Score:2, Informative)
Re:your worried about $250 (Score:2)
What if I don't want to invest in a tool that runs on a crappy OS, and is going to crash, and have high support requirements, and a short life cycle? Instead I want to purchase a product that runs on the same OS as the rest of my applications? IE Solaris. Is that too much too ask? Or do I have to buy another system just to run XP on to cut out the signs?
-BrentRe:your worried about $250 (Score:2)
Been there, done that. XP crashes about once a week on a almost new Dell notebook.
But still, the biggest problem is not stability, the biggest problem is just having to add a different OS to a network of identical systems. Doesn't it make more sense to run Solaris on everything instead of 4 Solaris boxes, 2 XP boxes, and 3 OS X boxes? Having jsut one vendor to deal with, one OS to keep up with, and all that?
-BrentXP and Dell Notebooks (Score:2)
Nuke XP and install Windows 2000. W2K is FAR more stable than XP, esp. on Dell laptops. (I just got an Inspiron 8200 - OMG it sucked under XP, runs great with W2K or Linux)
Re:XP and Dell Notebooks (Score:3, Interesting)
The client that I installed the Dell Notebook for bought it before XP was released. (But during the free upgrade period. I advised them to install W2K on it, instead of ME, which they accepted. The only problem was that a few of their applications did not run on W2K. So Dell swapped the W@K license for ME, and everything was well except for the crashes. XP did run those apps, so they upgraded as soon as they cool. It was mostly the same for them except that had a few less crashes.
-BrentRe:XP and Dell Notebooks (Score:2)
ME sucked, he upgraded to XP. It's OK, but still very flaky. Sometimes the mouse cursor disappears on the login screen, making it very difficult to log in.
He never uses standby/suspend, so I don't know how well it works on his machine.
XP's wireless support is known to be a pain to work with if there are multiple networks available. It's damn near impossible to install Lucent/Agere Orinoco drivers over the built-in drivers, which means that if your Orinoco card needs a firmware upgrade, watch out. It's gonna be a LOT of fun. (The built-in XP drivers don't work with the firmware updater utility)
On my laptop, I DO use standby/suspend. Let's just say that going into standby mode on a Dell Inspiron 8200 under XP is not a good idea - The machine will not wake up properly. Reboot/scandisk time. Posts abound on the Dell support forums of people who had power management hosed by SP1 or (like myself) had it hosed out of the box.
W2K is rock-solid on my I8200, and unlike XP, can actually wake up from standby!
Plotter Formats (Score:3)
Many graphics programs will output HPGL. As an odd suggestion, you might want ot look at PCB layout programs for programs that will generate Gerber plots. Also, I seem to recall several HPGL to Gerber tools.
Re:uhh.. (Score:2)
Sticky (Score:2)
Though I'm making an assumption that you just want something cheap (i.e. free as in beer) to respond to other posters I can perfectly understand why a Linux based plotter control system would be a good thing. Even running Windows the plotter/computer combination is a bit of a black box. If you can control that system easily and remotely it makes you workflow all that more efficient. I too have worked for a vinyl sign shop. We had a bunch of cheap Windows boxes built from crap found at computer fairs. I rigged up a thinnet network between them all so we could send finished files to the plotter box and print from there. It could be a pain sometimes working with Windows and its flakiness.
If I were setting up now and found find decent control programs for the plotters we used in Linux I'd strap a little Linux box to the plotter's stand and stick an Ethernet cable in it. From there you just need to mount a SMB or AFP mount from your design stations (running Windows or MacOS respectively) and then have a script on the Linux system chroned to scan the shared directory and if it finds any HPGL files to print them out. Most print shops have their proofing RIPs set up in this fashion. You just save to a network share and the RIP scans that folder looking for files to print out. It makes it pretty easy to use any design program and any RIP software because there is no need to low level communications, all they need to understand is PS. A design station/plotter server would be the same with HPGL instead of PS.
Never mind vinyl. The REAL question is... (Score:1)
I'm interested too. (Score:1)
I use to drive that plotter from DOS and I do have the low level drivers. I also did some neat things like creating a virtual pen number where I could assign the nib width to the pen via a table. Widest I tested was about 1/4" with a 0.010" real nib. The software just calculates however many passes are required to draw what a nib of the desired width would lay down. This is done in the low level drivers so I could link it into any software I wanted. At the time I was using the MCS contouring software out of Tulsa.
Anyway, I figure I can write what I need rather quickly and at this point basically I'd need to know what the problem is. Maybe we should put out heads together.
Linux is not a problem AFAIK. I drove that plotter from HP3000, DOS, OS/2 and from a lot of other mini's so I just can't see it really being a problem.
As for HPGL - that is really easy. I have HPGL drivers too so again I think the problem really is knowing what you need.