>that required my software to read HPGL output from Autocad.  What a joke.
> All HPGL output is in line segments.  It doesn't matter if you are drawing a
>circle or a line.  To Autocad, a circle is just 200 little line segments.  I


How would you have done it?

Remember, you can scale the x and y axis seperately in AutoCAD.  That means
circles get converted to ellipses.  Now, I don't have a HPGL book handy,
but I seem to recall that you can adjust x and y scaling independently on
the plotter with an HPGL command.  That covers the circle to ellipse
situation.

But what about an ellipse that's rotated so that the axis are skewed?
Again, working from memory here, there are HPGL commands to rotate, but
only in 90 degree increments.  What if the ellipse is at a 33 degree angle?
 (This may have changed with HPGL/2 or even later HPGL plotters.)

Maybe they figured it was better to write to the lowest common denominator
(pen up, pen down, change pen, move) than to build a completely custom
driver for every plotter out there.

If you need true circle info, you should probably use DXF or binary DXF.


For what it's worth, the version of Cadstar for windows I use outputs
everything in the gerber file as straight line segments as well.


later,
newell