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Back in high school, I did a bit of laser cutting using Adobe Illustrator. We would pull in 2D vector drawings from Inventor, but there was nothing stopping us

Back in high school, I did a bit of laser cutting using Adobe Illustrator. We would pull in 2D vector drawings from Inventor, but there was nothing stopping us from making things directly in Illustrator. I guess that would be an off-the-shelf alternative to some of these specialized programs.

Animats 6y ago
One thing you get from the specialized programs is offset. The width of the cut is not zero, even for laser cutters. The program needs to understand which side of the line is the "inside" and offset accordingly.
abeyer 6y ago
Yeah, Illustrator (or SVG, DXF, etc...) as a source format is pretty common, but there was almost certainly another piece of software (or possibly firmware, depending on the device) in the pipeline there. The source format is only the first step, you then need to generate tool paths from the source that actually direct the machine -- those involve converting the primitives from your drawing (something like "filled circle of radius r at point x,y") to a series of x/y/z motions that achieve the stated result, while accounting for all sorts of physical constraints like the nature and size of the tool, cutting speed, feed speed, etc... That's what the software mentioned is doing, and isn't something practical to do in Illustrator alone.
- detritus 6y ago
  Actually, where the laser is concerned - probably not. Most commercial laser cutting machines have a print driver that handles all the conversion between Creation and Output. I only ever deal with GCode when outputting to my CNC.
  - abeyer 6y ago
    Exactly... g-code is a toolpath format, and something needs to generate that. It can be a piece of standalone software, a printer driver, or whatever, but it requires more information than is typical (or advisable to put) in your image format. That said, I have seen some attempts at generating g-code directly in application plugins or something...it's possible, but not with great results typically, and it's not something built-in off the shelf.

Animats 6y ago

One thing you get from the specialized programs is offset. The width of the cut is not zero, even for laser cutters. The program needs to understand which side of the line is the "inside" and offset accordingly.

abeyer 6y ago

Yeah, Illustrator (or SVG, DXF, etc...) as a source format is pretty common, but there was almost certainly another piece of software (or possibly firmware, depending on the device) in the pipeline there. The source format is only the first step, you then need to generate tool paths from the source that actually direct the machine -- those involve converting the primitives from your drawing (something like "filled circle of radius r at point x,y") to a series of x/y/z motions that achieve the stated result, while accounting for all sorts of physical constraints like the nature and size of the tool, cutting speed, feed speed, etc... That's what the software mentioned is doing, and isn't something practical to do in Illustrator alone.

detritus 6y ago
Actually, where the laser is concerned - probably not. Most commercial laser cutting machines have a print driver that handles all the conversion between Creation and Output. I only ever deal with GCode when outputting to my CNC.
- abeyer 6y ago
  Exactly... g-code is a toolpath format, and something needs to generate that. It can be a piece of standalone software, a printer driver, or whatever, but it requires more information than is typical (or advisable to put) in your image format. That said, I have seen some attempts at generating g-code directly in application plugins or something...it's possible, but not with great results typically, and it's not something built-in off the shelf.