He used brute force for that if I’m not mistaken, which would make it very, very slow for anything but simple shapes (this can be seen in the video - it takes about 7 seconds to compute the V-carve path for the text “V-Carve”). It’s also GPL, which means if I even read his code for reference we’d have to open source LightBurn, which isn’t going to happen. The guy writing ours taught computer science, so they likely have a similar skill set.
InkScape uses an open source tool, called AutoTrace, which is also GPL, again, making it impossible for us to use. AutoTrace uses an approach called ‘thinning’ first, which “erodes away” the image until it’s a single pixel wide everywhere, then traces that and simplifies the results.
The one being written in-house should be significantly faster than either of those, and will be usable for a number of other things as well, including centerline trace, v-carving, and offset fills.
Currently we just use ‘Clipper’ to produce inward offsets, repeatedly, until there’s nothing new created, and this approach is slow. Computing the medial axis and generating offsets from that should be much faster.
Thank you for your kind words of support. We’re working in stages. Initially we’ll have Cut2D level features, and as time progresses we’ll add V-Carving, and quite probably 3D model or depth map handling.