User:Alessia/Plotter art

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intro

Pen plotters are iconic devices pioneers of digital graphic reproduction, magical devices that left an indelible mark on the history of design, visual art, computer graphics and engineering.
Pen plotters are nowadays disused, replaced sadly by large-format inkjet printers, or led toner based printers, that use a very fine matrix of dots to form images.
Anyway most recently we are experiencing, not just into the xpub bubble :) , a re-emerge of pen plotters within the generative art community.

Modern digital plotters, which are still in use today, evolved from analog XY writer plotters, output devices designed as precision measuring instruments and output devices for analog computers. The XY writer was a plotter that operated along two axes of motion, making it the most efficient way to draw vector graphics.

Historically, plotters were made with practical applications in mind like drafting blueprints, graphing data, or drawing large format maps, offering the fastest way to produce very large drawings or colour high-resolution vector-based artwork when computer memory was too expensive and processor power was too limited.

Pen plotters were very time consuming and difficult to use, users often found themselves concerned about the ink in their pens running dry If one pen dried out at the end of a plot, the total plot had to be redone most of the time. In spite of these limitations, the extreme resolution and colour capability of pen plotters made them the favourite output device until the late 80’s.

A number of printer control languages were created to operate this kind of machine, to transmit commands to move the pen itself. Three common ASCII based plotter control languages are HP-GL, the successor HP-GL/2 and DMPL.

example of HP-GL script drawing a line:

SP1;                 (Select Pen)
PA500,500;           (Plot Absolute, x/y coordinates)
PD;                  (Pen Down)
PR0,1000;            (Plot Relative, units in y direction)
PU;                  (Pen Up)
SP;                  (Select Pen - back in the stall)