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I am surprised you are having so much trouble with the software. What you might want to look into is how 3D printers and hobby CNC machines are controlled. GRBL

I am surprised you are having so much trouble with the software. What you might want to look into is how 3D printers and hobby CNC machines are controlled. GRBL for example is a standard CNC firmware that can run on an Arduino Uno and can control a 2.5 axis machine like a plotter easily. Combine that with some cheap stepper motors, GT2 timing belts and pulleys, a couple of endstop switches, and mounted on a 2020 aluminum frame and you got yourself a plotter that can do pretty much anything. Depending on the plotter you already have it could be as simple as reflashing the firmware on its controller. Another option is Marlin which runs on slightly beefier ATMega Arduinos. This is what’s used in most 3D printers. And of course you could just buy a 3D printer and mount a pen on it. The beauty of this approach is that you use a slicer to plan all the moves of the plotter on a much more powerful computer and the plotter just gets the GCode instructions of where to move each axis. The software you want is something that can generate an SVG out of your handwriting font, then convert that GCode. Inkscape can do that and I suspect it might be able to be driven from the command line. You’d need to script up a way to feed it speech to text, and for it to fit stuff onto pages, but that just sounds like a good weekend. Check this out for inspiration: https://medium.com/@urish/how-to-turn-your-3d-printer-into-a-plotter-in-one-hour-d6fe14559f1a https://medium.com/@urish/how-to-turn-your-3d-printer-into-a... Edit: second Google link for “3D printer plotter” has a reference to a stand-alone Python script that can take in any path-only SVG and spit out GCode. https://www.instructables.com/id/Use-3D-Printer-As-a-Plottercutter/ https://www.instructables.com/id/Use-3D-Printer-As-a-Plotter...

londons_explore 6y ago
I think OP is saying "without writing my own code and scripts to tie a bunch of tools together, I can't seem to do what I want". Which is true. There is no software I can see today which you can open a text file, select a font, choose a page size, and click "Print" and have a plotter do the drawing, just like Microsoft Word can do with a regular printer. In a way this is because 3D printers and plotters decided to have their own custom tooling and protocols (GCode isn't really a standard, since it is so machine specific), unlike printers where a PDF file will print on any printer pretty much.
- Multicomp 6y ago
  This. I will review parent reply links with interest but yes, until I can tie this entire operation together, the goals remain out of reach.
  - IgorPartola 6y ago
    Best of luck and I hope you find a solution. As I mentioned in my other comment, the only part of this I don’t know for sure is how to convert a written page to a path only SVG. I suspect GraphicMagick can do it. If so, your toolchain will be speech to text (pick your favorite one or use e.g. an Amazon Echo and a custom skill), text to HTML (with a stylesheet that sets the correct page size and your custom handwriting font), HTML to PDF using wkhtmltopdf, PDF to path only SVG using GM, SVG to GCode using the script from my link above or another similar tool, and OctoPrint or similar to drive the plotter remotely. You could likely bang this out in a day with a bash script. I am actually curious, how much would you pay for a complete solution like this? Also this is definitely inspiring me to add a pen attachment to my 3D printer and try some plotter stuff.
    - Multicomp 6y ago
      Im probably a cheapskate. Hence me buying the Chinese knock off vs the actual axidraw or similar. But if I can feed a page size in inches with 0.5 inch margins on all sides and have a given PDF or text doc printed, I'd pay 300-450 for a given product if it existed, if only to have this project off my plate. I know if it ever did exist it would be 2k like one of those fancy fully automatic book scanners but I suppose I could dream
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  I don’t think you will find a Microsoft solution to this. But that Python script can take in SVG. On the other hand you have easy speech to text software. I am not super familiar with text layout tools, but I am almost certain there are multiple approaches you can take to generate a paginated SVG from text with a given font and text file. HTML to PDF via wkhtmltopdf can certainly do that, and I suspect GraphicMagick can take a PDF and spit out a path only SVG. This isn’t the fault of 3D printers and their firmware. This is lack of understanding which parts of the tool chain do what. You wouldn’t expect a regular laser printer to recognize your speech, right? Most of them don’t do fonts either. And every single printer uses a different set of firmware and a different driver. By comparison, 3D printers use only about 5 common variants of GCode, of which GRBL and Marlin compatible ones are the most common by far. You can use multiple different slicers to produce tool paths for any given printer and printers from multiple manufacturers use compatible or identical firmware, guaranteeing that you don’t need to update drivers because that concept doesn’t exist. 3D printers came later and were able to avoid the many mistakes that 2d printers made. Everything is open source, everything is compatible and kept up to date, and even the hardware is abstracted away: you can swap in a 32 bit board for an 8 bit board, wire it up, change your architecture target, compile, and your printer will run as before. Have you ever tried putting a new board from an HP into a Canon printer? I doubt you’d ever be able to do that.

londons_explore 6y ago

I think OP is saying "without writing my own code and scripts to tie a bunch of tools together, I can't seem to do what I want". Which is true. There is no software I can see today which you can open a text file, select a font, choose a page size, and click "Print" and have a plotter do the drawing, just like Microsoft Word can do with a regular printer. In a way this is because 3D printers and plotters decided to have their own custom tooling and protocols (GCode isn't really a standard, since it is so machine specific), unlike printers where a PDF file will print on any printer pretty much.

Multicomp 6y ago
This. I will review parent reply links with interest but yes, until I can tie this entire operation together, the goals remain out of reach.
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  Best of luck and I hope you find a solution. As I mentioned in my other comment, the only part of this I don’t know for sure is how to convert a written page to a path only SVG. I suspect GraphicMagick can do it. If so, your toolchain will be speech to text (pick your favorite one or use e.g. an Amazon Echo and a custom skill), text to HTML (with a stylesheet that sets the correct page size and your custom handwriting font), HTML to PDF using wkhtmltopdf, PDF to path only SVG using GM, SVG to GCode using the script from my link above or another similar tool, and OctoPrint or similar to drive the plotter remotely. You could likely bang this out in a day with a bash script. I am actually curious, how much would you pay for a complete solution like this? Also this is definitely inspiring me to add a pen attachment to my 3D printer and try some plotter stuff.
  - Multicomp 6y ago
    Im probably a cheapskate. Hence me buying the Chinese knock off vs the actual axidraw or similar. But if I can feed a page size in inches with 0.5 inch margins on all sides and have a given PDF or text doc printed, I'd pay 300-450 for a given product if it existed, if only to have this project off my plate. I know if it ever did exist it would be 2k like one of those fancy fully automatic book scanners but I suppose I could dream
IgorPartola 6y ago
I don’t think you will find a Microsoft solution to this. But that Python script can take in SVG. On the other hand you have easy speech to text software. I am not super familiar with text layout tools, but I am almost certain there are multiple approaches you can take to generate a paginated SVG from text with a given font and text file. HTML to PDF via wkhtmltopdf can certainly do that, and I suspect GraphicMagick can take a PDF and spit out a path only SVG. This isn’t the fault of 3D printers and their firmware. This is lack of understanding which parts of the tool chain do what. You wouldn’t expect a regular laser printer to recognize your speech, right? Most of them don’t do fonts either. And every single printer uses a different set of firmware and a different driver. By comparison, 3D printers use only about 5 common variants of GCode, of which GRBL and Marlin compatible ones are the most common by far. You can use multiple different slicers to produce tool paths for any given printer and printers from multiple manufacturers use compatible or identical firmware, guaranteeing that you don’t need to update drivers because that concept doesn’t exist. 3D printers came later and were able to avoid the many mistakes that 2d printers made. Everything is open source, everything is compatible and kept up to date, and even the hardware is abstracted away: you can swap in a 32 bit board for an 8 bit board, wire it up, change your architecture target, compile, and your printer will run as before. Have you ever tried putting a new board from an HP into a Canon printer? I doubt you’d ever be able to do that.