HalftonePAL

HalftonePAL: Halftoning with Points And Lines.

This tool helps you turn pictures into halftoned patterns of lines, dots, and circles. These can be saved to TXT or SVG files to send to your pen plotter, or just saved as simple images.

Features

• Load your own images, and apply lots of styles!
• Change the detail level: lots of tiny lines or a few bold strokes.
• Choose how to arrange the circles:
  • Circle packing, quadtree, random dither, 1D and 2D error diffusion on square or hex grids.
• Choose what pattern to make from the circles:
  • Dots, circles, tilted lines, scan back-and-forth, connect the points with a Hilbert curve, make a greedy path between points, a greedy loop, a minimum spanning tree, a Voronoi diagram, a Delaunay triangulation, or connect the 3 nearest points.
• Optimize the pattern to reduce its length, or reduce pen travel time
• Save the pattern as JPG, SVG, and TXT files.
• Switch between black and white ink.
• Hide the largest circles, giving cleaner backgrounds.

For more details, a tutorial, and to download the source code, check out the github page.

And big thanks to @msurguy for compiling the MacOS version! Unfortunately, people with MacOS Big Sur may have trouble running the executable. I'm working on a solution, but for now you can try to follow these instructions to get it running, or download Processing and the source code.