I still have my HP 7550A. The Fastest Pen Plotter Ever Made. Six-G acceleration. eight pen carousel. can support arbitrary pens with 3D printed adapters and the cover off. and I still want to make (and sell) beautiful prints with it.
unfortunately I have bounced off this before, as the thing only handles HP/GL (and not HP/GL-2), which places some serious restrictions on the sort of input it's able to accept. The built-in arc drawing routines etc are primitive and accept a chord angle, so whatever's assembling its input might as well not bother, and just generate curves from its own line segments.
The one time I tried getting vector art into the plotter, it worked, but it generated the line segments out of order and so jumped all over the page, making it take many times what it should have to plot.
Since then, there's been advances in the state of the art of plotter utility software: vpype, for example. I haven't had the chance to try it out yet. It looks like it might vastly simplify the issue of getting good HP/GL out of other things that generate g-code/SVGs/etc.
A possibly bigger problem I encountered was that every avenue that would make it easier for me to get into generative art seems kinda closed off: they all seemed designed to allow programmers to easily and quickly make art, instead of for allowing artists to easily and quickly make programs. All sorts of javascript node type things, maintained by people with opensea links in their twitter bios. I am a visual thinker first and foremost, have extreme trouble translating my ideas into code in any situation, and this approach just doesn't work well for me.
has anyone else done research into this that's borne fruit
