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Errata: HPGL, the language referenced by the article as having been “forgotten by most operating systems” and used by most pen plotters, is still in use for eve
by Ancapistani 5y ago
Errata: HPGL, the language referenced by the article as having been “forgotten by most operating systems” and used by most pen plotters, is still in use for every vinyl cutter I’ve ever used.
In fact, vinyl cutters come with a pen holder and are also single-pen plotters out of the box. They’re a tool changing mechanism and a couple of firmware command implementations away from being capable of multiple colors - or you could just manually change the color of the pen and re-run the same paper through once for each color.
- deepspace 5y agoCorrect. Pen plotters have been superseded by large-format inkjet plotters for the most part, and those, like the HP DesignJet, still accept HPGL as input. CAD software stores objects in vector format, and it is much easier to write a vector output driver and leave the rasterization to the plotter, than to roll your own rasterizer.
- Doxin 5y agoNot to mention that rasterizing a blueprint-sized piece of vector image at 600dpi takes up quite some space. Leaving it to the printer to do the rasterizing means it only has to rasterize printhead-sized strips instead of the whole thing.