Super simple text interface front end to AxiDraw?

[EmbeddedMan]

I’m going to have a party. A party for nerds. As they enter the party, I want them to make nametags, with their names and an interesting fact about themselves. Since this is a party for embedded systems engineers, I want my guests to type in two text fields on a laptop (or tablet, or whatever) and have AxiDraw plot them a nametag with the text they typed in (along with some cute border art).

Has anybody written a front end application that could do this? I’d rather not reinvent the wheel if I don’t have to here. Maybe something that would take a couple pieces of text from two text fields, insert it into an SVG file, and then send it off to the AxiDraw?

The icing on the cake would be if I could also use the same application to auto-advance a “roll” of self-adhesive name tag labels.

So, anybody with any ideas? I’ve never done anything like this before- all of my AxiDraw work has been from within Inkscape.

Thanks for any advice-
*Brian

• This topic was modified 5 years, 6 months ago by EmbeddedMan.

[Windell Oskay]

I’ve seen this exact thing done for an event, but I don’t have the code for it. They had a JS application that you could type your name into and it would resize the text to fit in the label size.

If you want to do this within Inkscape, I’d suggest to make a template document the size of the paper, have the guests type within a text box there, and then use AxiDraw Merge to plot it — It will automatically replace the text with a stroke font and plot it.

Once you’ve done the first one, you can use Extensions > Previous Extension (or alt-q) to print the next one. So, just type and then a single keystroke to do text substitution and print.

Alternately, there are ways to do text substitution and drive the AxiDraw from the command line, but they aren’t as well integrated.

[Author]

Posts