Beginner Plasmac Questions

Thanks for the heads up on DXF2GCODE. I'll check that out soon. Do you have a PP for it or are you saying it's easy to just tweak it your self in settings somewhere?

That leads me to another question about feedrates.

From the user guide
"It is also recommended that holes with a diameter of less than 32mm (1.26") are cut at 60% of the feed rate used for profile cuts... PlasmaC can utilise G-Code commands usually set by a CAM Post Processor (PP) to aid in hole cutting or if you do not have a PP or your PP does not support these methods then PlasmaC can automatically adapt the G-Code to suit. This automatic mode is disabled by default."
That is in regard to holes, but what about coming into curves in general? Does the automatic mode only apply to holes? Does good CAM pp look ahead to see tight curves and slow the feed rate or do we just rely on linuxcnc's path planning, is it a non issue for short arcs, or what?

Hopefully my question here isn't too confusing...

That was not meant in any bad way, it is just the reality of the PlasmaC getting pulled into the reality of whatever someone somewhere thinks he knows best and making it very confusing for members like you that are doing their best to learn and understand and use PlasmaC, or to put it differently, using Fusion360 or AutoCad for Plasma cutting is utterly useless or something similar to shooting a fly with a shotgun = chances are the fly will continue to fly despite all the noise and collateral damage to the surrounding environment = wasting 2 hours to do a part that will take 2 minutes to cut, not counting the time it takes to learn using CAM.
Plasma cutting is a 2D affair and everything related to it should be treated the same way, as simple as possible so from the included wizard made by Phill that can do some intricate stuff to Inkscape that already has plenty of stuff related to plasma and outputs code that can be used directly in PlasmaC, that should be it ! Maybe add SheetCAM to the mix as it can do nesting easier and better than Inkscape.
My clients have over 10 plasma cutters in use every single day, all day, only one of them uses SheetCAM, and all of them use exclusively Inkscape. One of them went so far as paying over 7000 Euro for several Plasma CAM software packages, only to conclude that Inkscape does everything better overall. Do not get me wrong, some of those CAM packages had some nice features and some did one thing or the other better than Inkscape, while some where utterly useless, but in total the result was very disappointing.
Please do give the wizard and Inkscape a good look, you will not be disappointed.

See there, I had no idea that so many were just using just inkscape! Do they just use the default Extensions -> Gcodetools -> Path to Gcode... or is there more to it? "Prepare path for plasma..."? A plasmac pp for inkscape?

I'm reminded of another question. I see plasmac has some automagic logic for hole cutting like overcut, what about lead in/out?

First choose the tool as plasma, then prepare path then path to gcode.
Have a look at the 28 second mark, that is generated by Inkscape and that is the sort of stuff my machines do every day.

Whelp, inkscape 0.92 that I had installed would crash with gcode tools, inkscape 1.00 has an error that wont "process for plasma", dxf2gcode AND sheetcam crashes before it even opens! ... nothing to do with plasmac of course, I just felt like b*tching

AgentWD40 wrote: Whelp, inkscape 0.92 that I had installed would crash with gcode tools, inkscape 1.00 has an error that wont "process for plasma", dxf2gcode AND sheetcam crashes before it even opens! ... nothing to do with plasmac of course, I just felt like b*tching

LOL, you're on a roll ....