I’ve been using Lightburn for quite some time now and there are some repetitive tasks that I have to do manually and would like to automate if possible. It’s mainly about positioning existing tool layer shapes, inserting some text and scaling the text to fit the available space. There are some shortcuts to position things in the center of another object etc. but I’d like to know what more is possible.
Is there any scripting API or just functionality that I don’t know of to accomplish this task? I have several tool layers as templates where I insert text and sometimes graphics into. It’s always the same position, only with different fonts and font sizes.
Since the Lightburn file format seems to be XML, are there any software libraries for Java or anything available to work with that, or some documentation about the different XML objects? Maybe I could load an existing file and programmatically copy and modify a template group, but how would I calculate the bounding box of a text?
Any suggestion about simplifying this would be appreciated.
It would be interesting to have a specification of the .lbrn2 format. It can be reverse-engineered, but it would be long and prone to errors…
Since it is “open” (ie. plain text, as opposed to binary format), it wouldn’t disclose software secrets, and it would be interesting to make generators like those making material tests (but they use the older format, perhaps simpler?).
But of course, this has a cost: you have to spend time to write the spec, to check it is accurate, to maintain it.
To your problem: maybe you can automate some tasks using an external macro software, like AutoHotkey or AutoIt or similar. Although some operations can be difficult to do since it is a non-native Windows program (Qt) and because it is a graphical program (some things are out of view, difficult to point to, etc.).
This is already possible with the latest version, you can set a size for the text property, and it will scale the text to the available space. Combined with the serial number / CSV function, you could automate at least some parts of it. A video about it:
And the shape properties feature (can be combined with the technique above).
