graphtec inkcut configuration

Memory of the install and configuration of a Graphtec Silhouette Portrait vinyl cutter using inkcut under Ubuntu 15.10.

• Inkscape
• pygtk and gtk
• python-serial
• python-cups
• librsvg2-common

Graphtec has some specific software for their cutters, I never used it, supposedly it only works under Mac or Windows, so it was no use for me. I design most of my graphic stuff with Inkscape, so having a plugin that controls the cutter straight from Inkscape was my goal. It ought to be possible to do it under Linux OS, too. Normally, cutters use a protocol that is called HPGL, but Graphtec uses his own, which is GPGL. Luckily, some clever guys worked out a way to generate GPGL commands from Inkcut. I'm a lazy guy thant knows very little about installing and configuring things, so you will surely find many missing info,mistakes and nonsenses in this documentation, feel free to curse and facepalm! ;)

• After installing all the dependencies, we downloaded inkcut from here, first try I think I downloaded from the original site and it didn't have support for GPGL (I'm almost 50% sure about this).
• I uncompressed the tar.gz and copied its contents to home/user/.config/inkscape/extensions.
• Maybe this was only my problem, but the owner of the files was root, so I switched it to myUser with:

sudo chown -R myUser:myUser Inkcut-1.0

• With this, Inkcut appeared in Inkscape on the extensions menu, but we had to do some other things.
• Add the Silhouette Portrait in “printers”.
• In Inkcut, select “GPGL plotters (Graphtec)”, under “Properties” select interface>printer, name>silhouette portrait.
• Sometimes, when I draw a path on Inkscape, it misses to cut the last segment (you can watch it on the preview window). Normally it fixes simply selecting the path and applying “path>union”.

That's it! this kind of led me to have a Graphtec cutter working… hope it helps a bit, maybe sometime I'll include some screenshots…