Modular Synth Panels

being a resident of this fine city of berlin, and having some panel
design ideas floating around, i drove over to schaeffer last week to
get a better idea of what is possible from their milling service. it
was really fortunate to be able to see the material firsthand - the
web example photos being hard to judge by. from my perspective, only
the natural aluminum and black annodized looked appealing, and the
other anodized colors i found quite appalling. this is, however, only
*my* opinion.

i was particularly interested to see what could be done with HPGL
(.plt) graphics, since most schaeffer panels i've seen are rather
crude looking. to my suprise, some very nice graphics can be achieved
with a properly implemented HPGL file. i saw a two-color milled
schaeffer logo that had very nice detail. doing multi-color designs
requires 'separations' to be made, however, a la CMYK paper-printing.
i was told this is done by exporting a .plt file for each color area
of your graphic. of course, they have to be properly realigned once
imported into FPD! also, don't forget the necessity of having a 'wall'
between filled sections.

i also got a quick tour of the milling facilities, and must say in
general that the schaeffer people were very nice and extremely
helpful!

i'm trying some designs myself using HPGL exported from corelDraw
(what a clumsy program... i swear it was ten times as functional at
version 3.0). i have no idea when they'll be finished, but i'll of
course post some photos so that maybe others will experiment with
panel graphics (no more DIN fonts!). ah, that reminds me - although
FPD will allow you to use autocad .dxf fonts in your panels, they told
me that there seem to be a number of discrepancies within the .dxf
file format, and that most of the time, such files are unopenable and
therefore unmillable. i was urged to avoid using them as a font
source.

greetings to the group,

kevinski