HPGL Generator

a simple program for making flanges

Hand-coding HPGL is boring. Unless you want to pay big bucks for buggy commercial software, you're left with drawing in Corel (or something even more painful) and then tweaking the output with a text editor. Not exactly a day at the beach.

This is a tool for generating HPGL files for cutting metal on my groovy homemade plasma cutter. I've set it for a resolution of 1000 steps per inch to make it easier to tell where I am in a file.

Lead-ins are automatically generated from the center of each hole and 100 steps outside the rectangle. The funny-looking dotted lines are just the torch path when it's not cutting. The first move is the red one. If the kerf offset is big enough, you may be able to see that a red line indicates the cutting path, while a black line indicates the finished piece.

If you put in stupid dimensions, you will get stupid results. I am not responsible for any problems with this or anything else. Actually, I'm just plain not responsible.

Just copy and paste the code from the text box into a file and give it a .plt extension, and you're good to go!

This project was written using the extremely useful and free open-source tools PHP and GD and served up with Apache. If you use this and like it, please let me know.

Plain flange
1 hole flange
2 hole flange
4 hole flange

(I've left the phantom cutter tracks in the 1 and 2 hole versions. This is only to help see how far off center the hole is.)

And:
some other tricks with this same concept, including a live HPGL editor and a file upload form.


© 2003 Hal Eckhart

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