[Kosirich]

There is a boom in this field in recent years, specifically for laser texturing using femtosecond lasers. What were 10 years back laboratory lasers are now being put on standard CNC machine gantrys.

Unfortunately, what I see lacking in high end laser CNC machine market is software and no separation between CAM programming and execution that exists for milling machines. There is no equivalent to G-code that can be generated on w/e software and then run on different machine. There are cases where this is impossible as due to the way it's done, it would quickly overload even large RAM memory capacities.

[micwag]

I'm working in the laser marking/engraving field, we actually discussed G-code internally but in the end decided against it as it was not suitable for our product. (Too many laser parameter and "dynamic" stuff like QR codes)

[huytersd]

What’s the problem with just using existing CAD/CAM software and gcode?

[jacquesm]

I don't think there is a problem per-se, it's just that G-code tends to be rather static so if you're doing things like nesting and engraving of variable text going through and extra G-code conversion step can get a bit tedious.

I'm old school enough that I can program G-codes by hand (and by heart), compared to normal programming it is super simple, you can pick it up in an afternoon. But for complex graphical work the automatic conversion to G-code from a drawing tool is a real time saver. CAD/CAM software tends to export in some 2D format for laser cutting, usually either a 2D DXF file or SVG. You then convert on the fly to G-code in the laser driver software.