I'm working in a SCADA and I need some information about hpgl because I want to transform a bitmap to hpgl, I'm working in QNX.
Thanks

 

> I'm working in a SCADA and I need some information about hpgl because I want to transform a bitmap to hpgl, I'm working in QNX.

HPGL (Hewlett Packard Graphics Language) is a vector based language used to drive pen plotters. It will be pretty inefficient to transform a bitmap to HPGL. ('Course that's not what you asked. Check out HP's site. They should have some kind of reference available.

If you strike out, send me an email ([email protected]). I've got a book somewhere on HPGL.

 

i wrote an HP-GL/2 output module using the language syntax summary from the appendix of my plotter's user's manual. it's not difficult, and if you actually do it, i suggest using the language reference for your target device. (not all devices support the same variant of HP-GL.)

however, as the previous respondent pointed out, the commands are vector graphic commands; the language was designed to move the pen(s) of a plotter to (x,y) coordinates, and draw lines, characters, and geometric shapes.

unless you have a vector description of your bitmap image, the only way i can see rendering it with HP-GL is by dividing your plotting surface into a raster and filling each of its 'pixels' with a square of circle of the color from the bitmap. an interesting exercise, but probably not worth the trouble.

the real question is, why do you want to render a bitmap in HP-GL? what are you going to do with it? who's going to look at it, using what?

 

Grab an old pen plotter manual if you can.

I also seem to remember one of the manuals of
Autocad version 10 had the HPGL commands listed. It may have been the LISP programming
guide, if that helps

It should be simple since you just the pen up
(PU) and pen down (PD) commands along with the
coordinates. If I remember correctly, and it has been a while, but I think its like this:

PU 0,0 PD 0,10 PU 1,0 PD 1,10

This should draw two parallel lines of length 10
points. There should probably be an end or file
or something like that, but I can't remember.

Grab a windows computer, install an old plotter
driver, and send some plots to a file. It should
get you all you need.

Anthony Kerstens P.Eng.

 

You can download a trial version of "hpglview" at:

http://cern.web.cern.ch/CERN/Divisions/EST/CAD/hpglviewer.html

I think that it can convert from dxf to hpgl and vice-versa. You could transform
the bitmap to dxf with some utility (e.g. CorelDraw) and then to hpgl.

Hope it helps.
----
Ferran Arumi