It trumps an inkjet in that it (in principle) can hold other scribing tools besides pens, for example exacto knives, wood burning tools, engraving tools, milling cutters, etc. This weak little attachment would have a tough time holding heavy tools, but I wanted to prove out the workflow before committing more hardware effort.

I use export to HPGL from Inkscape.and then a custom go program to convert to g code.

package main

import "bufio"

import "flag"

import "fmt"

import "os"

import "strconv"

import "strings"

var scale int

var lift float64

var filename string

func parse(s string) (x float64, y float64) {

r := strings.Split(s, ",")

if 2 == len(r) {

_x, e1 := strconv.ParseInt(r[0], 10, 64)

_y, e2 := strconv.ParseInt(r[1], 10, 64)

if (nil == e1) && (nil == e2) {

x, y = float64(_x), float64(_y)

} else {

x, y = 0.0, 0.0

}

} else {

x, y = 0.0, 0.0

}

return

}

func main() {

// process command line flags

// 40 plotter units = 1mm

flag.IntVar(&scale, "scale", 40, "scale of the plot file in integers per millimeter")

flag.Float64Var(&lift, "lift", 1.0, "amount to increase Z with a pen up command")

flag.StringVar(&filename, "filename", "Guy_Fawkes_mask.hpgl", "file name to convert")

flag.Parse()

fmt.Printf("converting file %s at scale %d units/mm with lift %f mm\r\n", filename, scale, lift)

pen_up := false

var x, y float64

// open a file

file, err := os.Open(filename)

if nil == err {

defer file.Close()

reader := bufio.NewReader(file)

// issue reset all axes to zero command G92

fmt.Print("G92")

for {

line, eof := reader.ReadString(';')

// if PU increase Z and then rapid move

if line[0:2] == "PU" {

if !pen_up {

fmt.Printf("\r\nG1 Z%f", lift)

pen_up = true

}

_x, _y := parse(line[2:(len(line) - 1)])

x = _x / float64(scale)

y = _y / float64(scale)

fmt.Printf("\r\nG0 X%f Y%f", x, y)

} else if line[0:2] == "PD" {

if pen_up {

fmt.Printf("\r\nG1 Z0")

pen_up = false

}

_x, _y := parse(line[2:(len(line) - 1)])

x = _x / float64(scale)

y = _y / float64(scale)

fmt.Printf("\r\nG1 X%f Y%f", x, y)

}

if nil != eof {

break

}

}

} else {

panic(err)

}

}