Alternative Libraries

I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the existence of the following generative art/pen plotting libraries, all of which directly influenced the creation of elkplot. I have used all of them for creating art, was inspired be design decisions in all of them, and would not blame you for looking at any of them and deciding to use them instead of elkplot. There will be absolutely no hard feelings if you do. 😄

Processing

I first got started with generative art in Processing, and you absolutely can export as .svg and plot using the AxiDraw Inkscape plugin. I ultimately left processing behind because I wanted something that worked better with multi-layer plots, and also I prefer to work in Python.

vsketch

vsketch is a profoundly cool tool that draws inspiration in its coding style from Processing. It was a really natural next step for me, and the interactive plotting window that allows you to live-tweak parameters of your drawing and see the updated results in real-time is a feature that I badly miss and would love to incorporate into elkplot at some point in the future. vsketch also has native support for shapely, which introduced me to the amazing capabilities of that library. I ultimately moved away from working in vsketch because I wanted my code to directly control the axidraw rather than having to export an .svg and then plot from Inkscape, but I can't recommend giving it a try highly enough.

axi

axi was written by Michael Fogleman as an unofficial alternative to the official AxiDraw Python API, and for a very long time it was my primary tool for creating plotter art. My artistic workflow is different from Fogleman's, and so I forked the project and made my own version that gradually diverged more and more from the original as I patched in little tools for myself until eventually it became a bit of a mess, at which point I decided to start elkplot. elkplot's text generation, fonts, and the trapezoidal velocity motion planning code are directly taken (with permission) from axi, and for this I am profoundly grateful.