I'm building a simple CNC milling machine right now. Altough there are some solutions with printer-drivers out there, I want to write my own PC-side controlling software. BUT, I don't want to code the drawing software. So I was thinking about using some already great drawing software, export the drawing and load that file into my controller software. Not all file formats are open for everyone and I'm not sure where to look. The perfect case would be if there is some file format which gives me coordinates of every milling point. Or like coordinates of every corner or so.
Your question really has nothing to do with CNC file formats. It has to do with CAD formats. You should revise your post topic to reflect that.
There are two major categories of CAD software - vector based and point based. In a point based system, the linear approximation of curves is done as the curve is defined or exported, so the resulting file contains points. This sounds like what you want, although you may not have much control over the linear approximation values used (chord height tolerance and step size).
Vector formats tend to be proprietary.
If you mentioned which "great drawing software" you are considering, the output formats could be investigated.
The saveMultipleCurve.pde is drawing a curve as a combination of two mathematical functions (f(x) = a1x^2 + b1x; g(x) = a2x^2 + b2x + c2) and translates and rotates them. Everything gets saved to the data.txt in the order:
where x2 is the functions maximum and x3 the ending point. TranslateX and translateY gives you the curves starting point.
loadMultipleCurves.pde is doing what i intend the arduino should be doing: everything backwards, reading the 10 numbers and then drawing a curve from it.
I have no idea if this is working. I'm stuck on lonely island for two months and can't try this on an arduino connected to two steppers, so if you or anybody can try this, give a feedback.