On Wed, 29 Jun 2005 19:43:33 -0400, Roy Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Not just plywood panels, but sheets of paper, bolts of cloth, sheet > metal, plate glass, etc. A slight complication is that some materials > have a preferred orientation (i.e. plywood has a grain, textiles have > warp vs. weft, etc) and some don't (or it doesn't matter for the > application). > It gets even more interesting when you're restricted to making cuts > that start at an edge, or go all the way through the sheet to the > other side. I ran into this problem when I worked at a small computer store back in 1979 or 1980. One of our customers owned a plastics plant, and found such a program, and wanted us to install it and maintain it (on an 8080 or a Z-80 running CP/M, no less). The first release only did rectangles, and assumed flawless material, so his first trial was to tell the program about a 4 x 8 foot sheet of plastic, and ask for two 4 x 4 pieces. The program refused, because a saw blade has a non-zero width. But he had mis-specified the problem, because a 4 x 8 sheet of plastic was really a half-inch (or some small amount) bigger in both directions. Anyway, after a couple more years and a few more releases, the program could handle arbitrary polygons, shapes with various types of curved edges, arbitrary flaws in the material (mostly for knots in sheets of plywood), and I'm sure a few more things I don't remember right now. It could also beat his "best guy." Regards, Dan -- Dan Sommers <http://www.tombstonezero.net/dan/> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
