A recurring problem on my side is that traced artwork can contain very narrow bridges, walls, or gaps that are still mathematically present, but become too fragile or disappear entirely when machined with a V-bit.
In CAD/CAM terminology, this issue is often referred to as:
minimum feature size, minimum wall thickness, minimum gap width or morphological closing**
What I am looking for is not a global offset or contour expansion of the entire design. Instead, I would like a tool that performs a local correction of undersized areas:
- Detect regions where the distance between opposing contours falls below a defined threshold (for example 0.5 mm).
- Automatically widen only those local regions until the minimum width is reached.
- Leave all features with larger distances between opposing contours unchanged.
This would be especially useful for relief printing plates, woodcuts, linocuts, and other artwork where narrow features may survive in the vector file but cannot reliably survive machining or as in my case repeated printing.
Ideally, the workflow could include:
- Minimum wall/bridge thickness setting
- Minimum gap width setting
- Preservation of sharp line endings.
- Visual highlighting of problematic areas
- Optional automatic correction before toolpath generation
Such functionality is common in other cnc manufacturing fields where a minimum feature size must be guaranteed such as circuit trace manufacturing, and it would greatly improve the reliability of CNC-produced printing plates.
All the best, Guido