[erwan577]

These are objects from a time when people were willing to watch machines work, not just get instant output.

Today, even if small DIY plotters were cheap to build, they’d mostly live in the “art / hobby” space: most users won’t wait several minutes for a page when a laser printer does it in seconds.

That said, it would be great if a simple, well-documented DIY standard (protocol + format) emerged that hobby plotters could implement and that common tools (Inkscape, CAD, etc.) could support out of the box.

[MisterTea]

> That said, it would be great if a simple, well-documented DIY standard (protocol + format) emerged that hobby plotters could implement and that common tools (Inkscape, CAD, etc.) could support out of the box.

I know just about every CAD program, inkscape and many others use the text based DXF. Might be a bit overkill in some cases so perhaps a simple plotting language such as the plot format: https://man.9front.org/6/plot

[p_l]

HPGL and HPGL2 exist, and most CAD tools have ways to export to it. Not sure about inkscape, but it should be doable.

Hell, some plotters used to come with handbook of HPGL, even