hello,

im trying to get an old plotter make handwriting for me. this plotter understands HPGL.

the connection between plotter and PD works fine. im having my problems with giving the plotter the data in the right format and speed.

this plotter wants ascii-code. so i used convert.pd2ascii from the PDMTL abstractions. but i always get errors like "pd2ascii does not understand"

i dont know what im doing wrong since i only send letters and numbers. this abstractions should deal with that.

does somebody have any other idea?

thanks for any help

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/PLOTTERPATCH.zip

Hi.
I recently did the same thing in Max, I don't know exactly how pd deals with special characters, but here are some pointers.

• To read in the plotfile, I used Max's filein, which gives you ascii directly. I believe mrpeach/binfile does the same for pd?

• "," ";" etc are problematic in Max, and probably in pd too. to output "PA 120,200;" I used atoi ("asci to int in" max) only for the numbers, and inserted the , ; etc via an append / prepend chain with the corresponding ascii values, i.e. [append 59 13] to put ";" + CR at the end etc.

• occasionally one might need to use backslash as an escape char in Max, don't know about pd

• depending on the plotter, you might need to tell it to go into xon/xoff mode, this is some escape sequence, I "manually" translated to ascii and used it as a list in Max.

if its a hp plotter, most docs are available at hpmuseum.net (go for programming manuals), for other brands I hope it came with a printed one ...

good luck.