Little by little I’m increasing the complexity of what I can send to the plotter. As an image passes through the various programs I choose for a particular render, I push their limits and often run into bugs, memory limits and others. As much as possible, I dockerize each step so they are easier to summon and improve on their own. This also allows for pipelining.
I finally found a fast and reliable SVG->GCode converter. Inkscape’s is reliable but it’s extremely slow. I had to rewrite a part of it to be iterative rather than recursive so it could handle the size of the SVGs I am throwing at it.
Inkscape itself has a command line mode so some of the repetitive stuff I use it for are dockerized, for example to ungroup objects and break apart compound paths. It’s truly amazing.
I kind of want to publish all this but I have no idea if I violated any licenses frankensteining code from various sources. And I have much better things to do with my time than to find out. Things such as this wonderful plot: