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
              Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
      tel: 038 477 53 69 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl
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