Measuring How Far Pens Write: Writing Distance Test Pattern
As you may have learned on our YouTube channel, Unsharpen is currently running a number of tests in order to find out how far a pen can write. So far we’ve been doing the test using a a number of different of SVG files which are paired with an Axidraw pen plotter — essentially a drawing robot — in order to scientifically test the distance a pen can write.
Of course pens can last a very long time — up to 6000 meters are claimed by refills like the Fisher Space Pen PR4 — so the testing can take a huge amount of time, even with a robot!
The SVG files (or G-code in some cases) used by the plotters are essentially complex patterns of lines. While pen plotters can yield incredibly cool works of art, we’ll be using them to maximize how much and how quickly a pen can draw in a given area. Our pen plotter is A4 size, but others get much larger, for instance A3, A2, or even A0.
Our original test file was a page of Lorem Ipsum text. This had the strength of being an accurate and understandable writing assignment to give the plotter. The motion of the pen largely simulated a real-life writing sample, which was our primary concern in the initial test. Unfortunately each page took about 75 minutes to write, and some pens would last for over 15 pages (or 50 in the case of a ballpoint). The pages are not contiguous, so a manual change would need to be made every page, limiting throughput to (at the very most) 16 pages per day.
