This post used to be on Posterous. I rescued my posts before Posterous shut down and am now sharing them here.
I made this version of the Baltimore Node logo the other day in Inkscape, but wasn't at home to test it. Here are the resulting plots on both EggBot and Unicorn!
The Unicorn version came out a little messed up due to my sizing the file wrong - the pen went off the edge of my sticky note pad and mussed everything up. I resized the plot to fit the sticky note fine, but had some pen registration issues with the now-crumpled sticky note pad. I'll probably try this again later with some nicer stock.
To go with the new multiple-color plotting functionality of my Unicorn G-Code Output extension for Inkscape, here’s a new version of the Baltimore Node logo.
This one is ready to plot in 2 layers - all of the black parts at once, followed by all of the blue ones, with a pause at the beginning of each layer to allow a pen change.
I also made use of my Hershey Fonts in SVG to make the word “baltimore” more readable after plotting. This should make it look nice, for example, on an EggBot.
UPDATE!
I forgot to resize the original for a sticky note pad (whoops!) and I was right that the EggBot version needed layers beginning with a number.
Making text for Unicorn or EggBot plots isn’t always a fun process. Most tools require you to convert text into paths, and even then you get the outlines of shapes, which can often turn messy at small sizes.
mifga pointed me towards the Hershey fonts[1]. They’re a set of fonts for vector plotters named after creator Dr. A. V. Hershey who made them for the National Bureau of Standards.
These files are in a weird, weird, format. But after some normalizing, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, I was able to write some code to parse them and spit them back out as SVG! Now you can use these fonts in your Unicorn drawings.
Each SVG contains a layout of one of the Hershey fonts. The hershey_svg.zip file below contains all of the SVG files. The hershey.zip file contains the (cleaned up) original .jhf files. math-drawing.svg is just an example of using these glyphs, including scaling and stretching. I think the result is nice!
To use these in Unicorn plots, you’ll want to grab my Unicorn G-Code extension for Inkscape[2].
