[gilleain]

Yes the wooden table was the first thing that came to mind.

Oddly enough I have recently been drawing geometric designs, and then got the idea to draw them with a drawing ro bot. The current process is :

1. Draw design with ruler and compass

2. Photograph paper

3. Edge-detect image in Inkscape

4. Draw over the edge detected lines and save to SVG

5. Possibly convert to a graph, and run the Chinese postman algorithm over it

6. Convert graph to turtle commands and send to robot

So not far off. Also step 2 often involves a wooden surface...