TSP Stipple ordering for drawing output

[techninja]

First of all, great project. Pretty great speeds and beautiful output. I work on a pen plotter project called the WaterColorBot and have been looking for a fast stipple with SVG output for pen plotting to integrate into RoboPaint, and this is great.

The old standard has been StippleGen, a great program unfortunately limited by its implementation in both number of stipples and general performance.

One of a few things missing before I can attempt to use the output of this app is a "Traveling Salesman Problem" circle/path ordering of the stipples. Attempting to draw the current output with the given path order shows the paths to be in basically random order, requiring huge pen moves between each circle, resulting in a var more inefficient toolpath than one where the TSP ordering has been done.

Might it be possible to add path ordering like this? I've considered adding some kind of top->bottom left->right naive ordering as an after-process, but it would be more efficient to make it part of the creation step. Thanks!

[thegrandpoobah]

Hi! Thanks for using (or trying to anyways!) the application. I would be willing to do the same naive reading order ordering (left->right, top->bottom) that you are suggesting, but actually creating an optimal ordering based on the related TSP solution is outside the current scope of the project (contributions welcome though!). Now to find the time :)