Comments on: Huge Portland Design Week project

By: sandy

sandy — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 09:11:24 +0000

I added a little article about it on the wiki: https://github.com/euphy/polargraph/wiki/Vector-Optimizer, take a look.

The only change is that I think the optimizer does work with Python 3 now. Pop a message on the forum (where this has already been discussed a few times) if you get stuck.

By: spy101

spy101 — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 00:53:17 +0000

How do I get the script to work? I have never used python and have wasted so much time trying to figure out how to use this to process the map file. I have downloaded python 3.5 and been trying to execute the program with notepad ++, but I am unsure what file I need to launch, if anything needs to be changed or modified within the process file.. and so on. All I get is the program just hangs and never outputs an optimized map. Can anyone explain the process in simple terms, I would greatly appreciate it!!
-Jeff

By: olivier

olivier — Mon, 27 Oct 2014 23:22:29 +0000

Hi Kongorilla,

Evan’s optimizer should be fairly similar to the extension you mention. Both options determine the next line to draw by looking at the closest starting point only. His ‘reversing’ branch also checks the reverse of each line which in our limited testing shows quite a substantial improvement (2x quicker than the non-reversing one for a test drawing of a street map we looked at). He’s still testing that branch a bit more before he’ll merge it into master.

By: kongorilla

kongorilla — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 05:15:13 +0000

Amazing work, Evan and Olivier! Thanks for sharing.

In the past I’ve used the “Reorder Paths for speed…” extension for Inkscape, created by Evil Mad Scientists as part of their Eggbot tools. For one of my more egregiously jumbled SVGs, it got an 18hr draw time down to ~9hrs, IIRC. If this new optimizer is even more effective….you guys are boss!