[rescue] Cleaning out advice needed...

[Scott Newell]

>   Pen plotters are VERY cheap.  I have a big E-size Draftmaster sitting
>on mothballs until I get a bigger house...I paid $100.00 for it a
>couple of years ago.  The same gov't surplus place had a bunch of the
>big E-size inkjets, beat up and some even missing parts, that were
>going for $1K *as-is*.  And with worse-quality output to boot! (at
>least for the kind of stuff I plot...architects and landscape designers
>put those big inkjets to much better use).

The plots we do at work would take _hours_ on a pen plotter, so it's hard
to get too excited. 


>   HPGL is also very, very easy to deal with.  I wrote a simple (and,
>well, primitive) PCB autorouting package for X11 about 11 years

Wow, that's _very_ impressive!  Autorouting is one of those things that's
always impressed me, even if a lot of the autorouted boards I've seen look
like crap.  That, and that I have just about no idea how you'd go about
actually automating it.  (I can almost picture the algorithm/heuristics:
"let's see, I can take 0.2" off the trace if I use this run, but that adds
two vias to this other run and lengthens it by 0.05", what to do....what to
do...)


>To illustrate, I fired it up a moment ago to take some pics.  Here is
>my HP 54111D digital oscilloscope looking at a QYXie's infrared
>transmitter's carrier generator waveform, which is subsequently plotted
>on my HP 7550A plotter:

The TDS3014 here at work speaks a bunch of printer lingos, but I usually
use an old Laserjet for lab notebook hardcopy, or gzip'd tiff for anything
that I need in electronic format.  Since the acquired data is already
digitized in both the time and amplitude domains, I don't really care that
it's a raster format, and I think it looks good.


HPGL:  BTDT, more than a few times.


newell