Hi,
Does Lightburn.exe have a command line switch to specify layer/colour cut properties? Either specifying a .clb file or select items from a .clb?
Why? Because I have written a program to generate a DXF file, which is automatically opened with Lightburn by specifying the filename of the DXF at the command line, and would like to have the program ask for a material type and specify some cut settings at the same time as starting Lightburn.
Fingers crossed,
Luke
No, there is nothing like that. If you have written a program to write a DXF file, why not just write directly to a LightBurn project file instead? The format is XML, much simpler than DXF, and was intended to be fairly human readable.
Oh, I’ve missed that there is a there a description of the .lbn file format? One that describes how to represent lines, circles, arcs, text etc?
I’ve been using the ezdxf Python module, but can implement a prototype version of a Lightburn producing module.
Thanks in advance,
Luke
No formal description, but if you make a circle, lines, or text you’ll see how it’s represented. Arcs aren’t supported - everything is just lines or bezier splines. Have a look at a couple of files, then post back here. There are likely a couple pieces that will need explaining, but it’ll be easier if you’ve looked them over first.
OK, thanks, had taken a quick look at the .lbn files generated after saving my imported DXFs and while could see various XML elements that sort of matched what I was expecting, it was probably the lack of obvious arc structures making it look more different and put me off trying to reverse engineer it. My project includes a lot of arcs, approximately 1 arc for each straight line it produces so the differences might be exaggerated 
Wanted to keep reverse engineering to a minimum for obvious reasons of tracking/keeping up with offical changes to the LightBurn .lbn format, especially considering Lightburn already imports DXF.
That’s not a critisism - just an observation/explanation.
Will look in to a Python module/library thing to generate .lbn files over the next couple of weeks - don’t need to address the layer/colour settings right at the moment for my project, but would like to. Have already implemented a basic XML output to help with debugging so it’s probably not that difficult, probably biggest problem at the moment is understanding how to describe an arc as a bezier spline. Time to do some investigation.
Thanks again and will probably be back with questions soonish,
Luke
Arc to spline is a bit of a pain, but it’s not terrible. Some good links:
https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/BezierCurveApproximationOfAnArc/
The Aleksas Riškus paper is what I used.
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