Yet another SVG to GCode converter.

I have tested a few, no one worked as expected, so I took my best js skills (haha) to make my own converter. It worked for many of my cases.

Why javascript ? Why inside a browser ?

Well, it was for me the easiest way to get it ready quickly : browsers provide very high level methods on SVG objects, especially :

• getTotalLength()
• getPointAtLength()

These only two methods made me immediately sing That's the way I like it !
So I made it this way instead of a pythonish or clojurish thing. (although Clojure would have been a very cool language to write this)

One difficulty was the compound paths management. Finally it was just a matter of :

• Giving all the paths absolute coordinates
• Splitting paths on M commands in the data string

How do I use it ?

You might want to optimize your file with svgo before processing, but it's not necessary.

• First off, you must convert your drawing into paths, and only paths.

• Simply paste your SVG text into the first field (no XML header, only from <svg> to </svg> included)

• Set the desired segment length. I typically use 0.5

• Click the Convert to GCode button. The browser may hang a bit and ask you if you're sure you want to continue the script execution: say yes... Every time.

• Your GCode appears in the second field.

• The SVG file is displayed

• A preview of the parsed SVG is displayed too. No worries if the image is cropped, I'm just too busy to make it work better for now. PRs are welcome :)

• You can now copy-paste the generated G-Code in a file, and load it into bCNC, or any G-Code sender (but I must admit bCNC is the best)

Stuff that helped

This program uses Snap.svg for its cool function that makes path coordinates absolute.

It also uses Bootstrap, because, you know, Bootstrap :)

Notes

You can customize pen up and down commands usuing the PEN_UP and PEN_DOWN globals in app.js.

The program doesn't care about your svg units, it just uses numbers (the generated GCode is set to mm by default).

Hope this program works for you too :)

What's missing ?

• Don't do the the pen up/pen-down if the distance to go is below some threshold.
• Make this program CLI-friendly

Feel free to enhance it !

And I hope this program will work for you too :)