Re: Creating SVG: using MetaFun, exporting proper units, conversion to DXF

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

On 6/29/2016 10:49 PM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> On 29 June 2016 at 14:12, Hans Hagen wrote:
>> On 6/29/2016 12:31 PM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I want to play with CNC and don't yet have any experience with CAD
>>> software (nor the licence for the expensive ones) other than perhaps
>>> some Blender, so I decided to try to use the super ugly route with
>>>     metapost -> svg -> dxf -> g-code
>>> for the first time.
>>>
>>> I have a few questions.
>>>
>>> (1) I love Hans' shortcuts in metafun, but I seem to remember that things
>>> like
>>>     input metafun;
>>> or perhaps
>>>     input mp-tool;
>>> used to work, so that I don't have to remember to use
>>>     mpost -mem=metafun my-drawings.mp
>>> when compiling the graphics.
>>>
>>> Did the method with "input" ever work (or is it supposed to work)? Now
>>> I'm getting a bunch of weird errors.
>>> I would love to specify everything in the source file and then just
>>> call mpost. If that doesn't work, that's fine, I can still add
>>> "-mem=metafun", but ...
>>
>>
>> input metafun.mpiv ;
>
> How should one properly compile that file then to get the SVG?

some mp directive (but i never tried) as i always just use \startMPpage 
.. \stopMPpage so that fonts etc work ok too

> Using just "mpost something.mp" doesn't work that way.
>
>>> (2) I guess that using "raw metapost" is the only sane way to generate
>>> SVG. If I use metapost inside ConTeXt that's probably not going to
>>> work, right?
>>>
>>> (3) Is there any way to convince the SVG output mode to generate something
>>> like
>>>     <svg ... width="100.0mm" height="100.0mm" ... >
>>> rather than
>>>     <svg ... width="283.46456692913387" height="283.46456692913387" ... >
>>> because the program I use to convert SVG to DXF has troubles
>>> interpreting "points" properly. I read somewhere that they assume 90
>>> points per inch because that's Inkskape's default.
>>
>> why not just
>>
>> \startMPpage
>>   whatever you want
>> \stopMPpage
>>
>> and then use mudraw (mutools) to go from pdf to svg (that's what i do when i
>> need svg)
>
> Given that metapost supports SVG natively I imagined that it would
> produce a simpler/cleaner output. Thanks a lot for the suggestion,
> I'll test it.

the svg from pdf is normally quite simple as it just output the same 
paths, colors etc + text as outline

> It turned out that the (opensource) tools I used for converting SVG
> into DXF gives very weird result, so I have to change the other parts
> of the "toolchain" as well.
>
> Nevertheless, the question about whether one could convince MP to
> output true units in cm/mm/in.-- 

no, but you can of course scale the whole lot just before shipping so 
that units represent cm

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                                           Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
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