Fair enough, but that doesn’t mean it should suck to use Inkscape.
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I think that is the thing. Because it is a professional machine epilog has spent 0 time trying to get a free program to work easily with it when corel is cheap and widely used in the industry.
I thought the advantage of a print driver was that it was (supposed to be) pretty much universal
Well – a tool is a tool. Inkscape is incredibly useful, AI is incredibly useful. What works for the artist and maker is what matters, and one works better for some folks than the other, regardless of what folks say. I knew a very gifted and sought after painter who did his breathtaking paintings using latex house paint, while I have been a sculptor for over 45 years and I was one of the first to use various crochet hooks and old dental tools as the primary tools in my work. Dental tools are now a major part of a sculptors quiver of tools today, but the looks I got back then – oh boy… 
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Tools? Welp, how about pure CSS?
(These CSS projects blow my mind. If you’re at all familiar with CSS this is jaw dropping)
Or Excel?
That being said, from what I am hearing, the epilog is a lot more dependent on your own setup. You gotta have the right drivers, the right software, the right workflow.
Glowforge’s model is a lot more forgiving of local setup, and from their perspective this is pretty much unmitigated good. They get tons of metadata about what we’re doing (free market research! ***) and a much simpler support process. They get to open the machine to a wider audience that isn’t necessarily tech savvy, and allow all kinds of creatives to express themselves with a Glowforge. The entire community benefits from the diversity we all bring to the table.
From my perspective the serverside model is pretty good too, I don’t have to think too hard about the tool, I can just concentrate on using it. Yes there are some delays because of network traffic and safety checks (Is your material really that height? etc), but overall this model seems miles simpler than fooling with janky print drivers. And I don’t care what anyone says, and no I haven’t used an epilog, they are janky. All drivers are janky, prone to going out of date and cross-platform incompatibility. With the GF model, if the “driver” needs updating, it’s completely transparent to us.
So, I’m glad some people like epilog and their ilk. People also used to like to build their own PCs and program punch cards, but the technology and market changed and now we don’t have to… so why would we, unless we find that sort of thing fun or have very specific needs?** If you do find it fun, there are a whole host of chinese laser cutters with your name on them 
** says the dude who likes to fool with arduino. Talk about low-level tech!
*** Who knew we’d all suddenly be engraving cheapie tiles from home depot? @dan must just love to see how this all happened.
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i can’t speak to the epilog, i’ve never used one. but industrial lasers that use print drivers aren’t necessarily janky. i really like the universal control panel, which uses a print driver to load the control panel.
are there things i would change, especially knowing what the GF does? for sure. but there are things the universal does that the GF won’t do, too. neither is the be all and end all.
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I still stand by my assessment that all print drivers are janky. Older OSes, weird setups, different platforms all have issues with them. I’m not saying they can’t perform well for a specific well-maintained setup but that’s not the only market GF is trying to capture.
I’m also not saying that you can’t maintain (emphasis on maintain) a suite of drivers for all manner of client configurations, but that requires a lot of development across many platforms, something a single serverside setup neatly sidesteps. (Along with sidestepping the need to issue software updates to the aforementioned all manner of clients, easier said than done)
And yeah I’m sure universal makes a hell of a machine, with good software to run it. They dang well better given the cost :). The machines you run and GF are more distant cousins than siblings, yes?
print drivers can be janky, but aren’t janky by default. i don’t think you need a particularly well-maintained setup. i’ve been printing to lots of different printers for a long time from different machines. sometimes things happen, but the vast majority of the time, things work just fine. when they don’t, 99% of the time a driver update fixes it. it’s not like the old days where drivers lagged behind system updates.
as i said, there are advantages and disadvantages to both. neither is a silver bullet.
distant cousins? i guess? but like i said, i see positives and negatives from both.
A print driver is a strange idea. It’s an interface that was designed to convey instructions for putting images on paper. Lasers that use a print driver are based on the assumption that enough of the original intent survives the translation process for them to know that the user wanted to cut a line here and a circle there, and engrave this other part. In practice, it seems to work, but I’d be worried about software updates broking those assumptions.
Admittedly, SVG is asking for trouble too, and we see a lot of that trouble in this forum. But for the market that’s being targeted, I’m not sure that having to use a complicated CAM processor to output machine-specific G-code is that better of an answer.
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i don’t know. it makes perfect sense to me. the things you need to communicate to the control panel are pretty basic. line weight, color, scale, fill, bitmap. everything else is done in the control panel based off of those specifications and a print driver is perfectly capable of communicating that info, just like it does when you print an image.
now, if you’re unhappy with how the control panel works with that info, that may be a different issue than the print driver itself.
From here:
The Microsoft Windows 2000 and later printing architecture consists of a print spooler and a set of printer drivers. By calling device-independent functions, applications can create print jobs and send them to many devices. This includes laser printers, vector plotters, raster printers, and fax machines.
One would think a ‘vector plotter’ would be similar to a laser cutter/engraver, no?
Plotters may be ancient history, but there was a time not that long ago (when Windows 2000 was new), that they were very common for making hard copies of engineering drawings.
Engineers are typically pretty demanding when it comes to the accuracy of the drawing when it hits the paper.
I knew one that would break out his calipers before he let the plotter tech leave.
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LOL! I remember those - large format ones were cutting edge and tres’ expensive.
The vinyl cutter our makerspace has uses a plotter’s driver - the knives can be replaced with plotter pens in fact. Trouble is I can’t find them anywhere and the machine that used to drive it has disappeared Into the great Google Hunt.
I’m not ancient (yet) and I had a Roland Plotter with cutter blades. Saved my organization a lot of money on signs. It used a printer driver to interface and line colors determined precedence in cuts. Sound familiar?
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Might be able to make a mold of the holder out of suguru and use any pens?
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Can you adapt a tangential cutting knife from a Cricuit or Shillouette cutter?
Sorry - I can see my statement was ambiguous. We have pens & knives, just missing the drivers. Lots of sites come up when we search for the model # but then the site’s drivers specify other models. So it’s a matter of trying to find which driver family might work. Tedious.
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Oohhhh. Yes. Not an easy or trivial job.
“Pretty much” being the important part of the sentance there I think. It works fine in the more proffesional programs but less so in the free crowd programmed ones. Similar to how android is “universal” but an app will be iffy on some phones.
Trotec and epilog also have a stand alone software to run the lasers that you bring your files into and run from there. Similar to the glowforge UI, just local and with more settings/features (being able to set material defaults for instance). So even they are evolving away from the print driver it seems.
Another update: I switched the machine over to TCP by installling a USB ethernet dongle on the Windows PC. Now I am able to use VisiCut. Turns out that even though the UI is miserable in so many ways, the functionality is exactly what I want. You can load an SVG and it lets you select which attributes mean cut or engrave, reorder them, reposition the artwork, etc., and then just send it to the machine. About on par with the GFUI.
It also has a particular affinity for Inkscape, including a plugin the send a file directly to VisiCut. All in all, this gets around the workflow issues that were most vexing, so I’m going to train my first group of eager laser enthusiasts today. There’s room for 8 in the class, and the waitlist is already 54 people.
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