Exploring etching some words onto plastic sheet.
Inkscape so far seems to be the goto favourite, and so yesterday started playing with the eggbot extension that fills with the hatch ... random lines shooting off in all directions! had a drink, then kinda got that figured that out ... tightened up the lines by using a large font, filling, changing the stroke thickness afterward to much thinner lines, then scaling the text down afterward .... and then I read this:
Another drawback of this extension is that the fills it generates are not smooth, continuous tool paths. Rather the fills are many independent line segments, each segment requiring pen up and pen down operations in order to be drawn. While the fills may look pleasant on a computer display, they are not optimal for the task of plotting a color filled region with a pen plotter.
from here: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4943
Made me concerned about the machine going kaput a few months of production, doing the etching this way. Or at least wearing out the engraving tool more quickly. I know the SB is made to be "run all day long", but why stress it unnecessarily. I am going to be cutting out some simple shapes, no problem, and etching some words onto each of them ... which i think is where the heavy lifting is going to be ( and perhaps be time consuming.)
SO. I started playing with Live Path Effects in Inkscape, Hatch fill rough. There are supposed to be some nodes floating around in "the middle" there that control bend and scale/direction, but playing with a large letter "L" (object to path, live path effects), I only see the path, or cusp nodes. I like the idea of far fewer tool up/downs creating the cross hatch etch all day long. Anybody?
... should I explore Illustrator instead for this? I have CS5, never used, but understand Image Trace may do this ?? Before I dive in there blindly, perhaps someone has explored this territory before and can sketch a map?!!
don't worry. no more drinks. yet.