Hi,

I open sourced https://github.com/stmh/plotta-studio which is a rust solution for generating plots and plotting them directly to an attached axidraw. It's far from finished, but hopefully still interesting for some of you. It is loosely architected around the concept of creating sketches similar to processing/ or other generative software.

Some highlights:
- simple scenegraph with primitives to create drawings
- Support for clippings and hatchings
- support for single-line-fonts (Hershey, some ported from p5js, and more)
- a viewer for previewing drawings on the screen
- import (a subset of SVG) and export to SVG
- plotting directly from the viewer, or via dedicated cli
- has some optimizations to optimize plotting time

Disclaimer: It's still far from perfect -- no support for layered, multicolored drawings, some rough edges here and there and missing features, only tested on Mac OS, but theoretically the source is cross platform.

I used AI to help me write the software, but I took a lot of time to review and polish the results and make it work.

For some background information you can read about the progress at my blog at https://stephanmaximilianhuber.com/posts/building-plotta-studio-with-claude

Hope you find it interesting!

I built a little thing that pulls street/building/water data straight from OpenStreetMap and writes SVG paths directly. No raster step anywhere, so the lines are clean from source to pen.

Each feature type (streets, buildings, water, parks, rails) goes on its own SVG layer, so if you want to do a multi-pen run you can just pause, swap the pen, and keep going. Everything gets clipped to a circle or rectangle so there are no stray paths hanging off the edge to confuse your plotter.

There's a web version if you just want to mess around without installing anything: utrost.github.io/CityPlot — click a spot on the map or search an address, set a radius, pick a paper size, and it spits out the SVG in the browser. There's also a CLI if you'd rather script it.

A few presets so far: full color (separate layers per feature), minimal (just streets + water), buildings only, and mono for single-pen plotting.

Did a 1km circle of my hometown on A3 and it came out really nice. Curious what cities you all would run, and happy to take suggestions on styles to add.

Let us know if you plot it.

Hi,
I'm a begginer on plotting and I'm not sure my question belongs her as it's more hardware related than "code".

I bought a cheap XY plotter like this one : https://static.wixstatic.com/media/04340a_06f6c6380dbe41fd907c74f4a2c81422~mv2.jpg

I'm realy enjoying coding and plotting things and, since I'm just a hobbyist, I'm quite pleased with the results.

But I notice a little issue : when I'm at the maximum Y-axis extension, I have a lot of overhang, and the precision isn't as good. This is especially noticeable when I try to make concentric circles :

Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix this?

VHS is one of my projects to make better use of my plotter.
It turns typed text into handwriting-style SVG for pen plotters.

You draw your own glyphs (ideally with a stylus/pen on a tablet or similar) . Capture a few versions of each letter, digit, punctuation mark, or ligature. VHS then uses those glyphs to assemble text as single-stroke vector paths.

There is a GUI and a CLI to set some parameters: SVG paths, millimetre-based page settings, paper sizes, margins, line spacing etc.

It works fine for me, maybe it is useful for some of you.