iscriptdesign online dxf

[jeroend]

scriptdesign: online dxf generation and display

Hi I just released a new version of iscriptdesign an online design tool where you can display, customize and export designs and blue prints for artifacts. It also allows you to upload your own designs. But until so far iscriptdesign only had one export format: SVG. Where SVG is a modern and versatile format and in fact part of the open html5 standard, its adaptation in the cnc world has been limited. A few converters for svg exists, but none of the opensource package were good enough for my purposes, let alone for inclusion in my javascript/SVG website. A visit to fablab always resulted in the useage of adobe's illustrator to convert SVG to DXF. Adobe is not free (far from) and therefor the possibility to export to DXF has been high on my agenda.

iScriptDesign's iPath module for generating fluent interacive paths has proven to be ideal for generating online customizable and animatable svg graphics. And now with the possibility of dxf export I expect that it will prove to be a valuable tool for generating cnc input.
The possibility to script your graphics makes it possible to customize your graphics and designs in every possible way, even to adjust for the width of your milling bit (no need to adjust for sharp corners in cnc program). 2 files ar of particular interest: (projects -> iPath -> dxf -> gear and penandholes). Both showcasing the possibilities of the current implementation. You are encouraged to download, view and edit the files in a plain text browser, and start experimenting with them (by uploading it via the dropspot)

A few things to note:

• it only works for Google Chrome (the latest version), Firefox works apart from the file download. The other browsers have been not or negative tested. Realize that iScriptDesign is using bleeding edge browser support, which is not fully supported everywhere yet. I'm more than confident that it's only a matter of time before other browsers (apart from IE but that's another story) will catch up. Feel free to make modification to support other browsers (check it out from: iscriptdesign - script your designs in svg. - Google Project Hosting), submitted patches are highly appreciated, as long as you don't wreck the supplied unittests.
• Only straight lines are supported, support for bezier curves and arcs is in progress. Again feel free to help me getting this logic in place.

I'm hoping for feed back on the useability of the dxf, possible errors or improvements in the generated dxf or other feed back.

I do hope that iscriptdesign will be as valuable for you as it has been for me.