Not that I’m aware of.

If you design purely in 2D, I think techniques almost exactly like the ones from my “volumetric color” message would work.

If you design in 3D and then project (why?), that would require more thought but I think that a technique similar to the one I used for union would work - basically, project the first color, then project the second color and subtract the projection of the first, then project the third color and subtract the projections of the first and second, and so on.

But my impression was that the real problem with using OpenSCAD for laser work was in the lack of a true “line”.

On Wednesday, December 24, 2025 at 03:36:09 AM EST, Jordan Brown via Discuss discuss@lists.openscad.org wrote:

If you're willing to branch out to Open(Python)SCAD I managed to work up:

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview/blob/main/gcpcutdxf.py

which allows making a DXF, using arcs --- if someone wants to post an example of a design I'll gladly work it up for the templates folder.

William

PythonSCAD can render colored 2d shapes.
Its great fun to import colored svgs and extrude them.
Admittedly projection cut is not yet implemented as  the correct expected
behavior is not yet clear to
Me.
But I am happy to improve in short time when it gets clear.

Am Donnerstag, 25. Dezember 2025 schrieb William F. Adams via Discuss <
discuss@lists.openscad.org>:

--
Null

My workflow is typically to design in 3D, so that I can visualize and
model.  I then can do a projection(cut) to prepare for laser cutting.

If I can get some color to map through to SVG, then I can use different
colors to map to cut/engrave in the same file.  This simplifies my workflow
quite a bit.

EBo --

On Thu, Dec 25, 2025 at 12:20 AM Guenther Sohler via Discuss <
discuss@lists.openscad.org> wrote:

re: PythonSCAD...

I have looked at it briefly, and will dive back into it again after I clear
my current MUST-DO list. I will likely reach out to you, @William F. Adams
willadams@aol.com and @Guenther Sohler guenther.sohler@gmail.com, for
questions to rebuild my workflow.  I'll need to work through how to
continue modeling parts, but if it works, it works.

EBo --

On Sat, Dec 27, 2025 at 9:52 PM John David ebo.2112@gmail.com wrote:

I have carved out a little time to come back and look at this, and I have
some very simple questions about PythonSCAD and the status of a colored SVG.

• Has there been any forward motion on color svg's in the last 2 or 3
  months?

Since I now have a working PythonSCAD install running next to OpenSCAD, I
have a couple of noob questions that I have not seen any place:

• are there advanced working examples of osuse?  In particular using
  functions?
  I was able to get the project I wanted to use for setting up a
  laser-cutting tool-chain to call one of my OpenSCAD libraries to partially
  work,
  but a function I call to generate a two-dimensional array is
  triggering a seg fault and crashing PythonSCAD.  I will post a proper bug
  report
  later, but I have hours of spelunking before I am sure I am "doing it
  right(tm)"

• is there a way to run projection cut on an object in PythonSCAD?  This is
  what I tried:

  obj = funct.generate_obj(...)
  obj.cut(True)
  
  and similar variants, but I keep getting the error "AttributeError:
  

'openscad.PyOpenSCAD' object has no attribute 'cut"

In the past, I would design everything in 3D, so that I could visualize
part assemblages, and then use "cut(true)" to generate the laser tool path.

• can someone repost the PythonSCAD => colored SVG example I recall, but
  cannot find? I'll try working from that end to the middle...

I am really hoping that I can get osuse and the projection cut functions
working, so that I do not have to either rewrite thousands of lines of
OpenSCAD code into PythonSCAD. That said, if I can get something to work, I
am willing to refactor my libraries to use PythonSCAD.

Thanks in advance

On Sat, Dec 27, 2025 at 10:02 PM John David ebo.2112@gmail.com wrote:

On Wednesday, February 4, 2026 at 12:41:25 PM EST, John David ebo.2112@gmail.com wrote:

I have carved out a little time to come back and look at this, and I have some very simple questions about PythonSCAD and the status of a colored SVG.

No idea, I did colour DXFs because the differing coordinate system gave me a headache and I can get an SVG from a DXF by opening in LibreCAD and re-saving.

This search brings up a couple of discussions of it:

https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenPythonSCAD/search?q=osuse&restrict_sr=on

I'm not seeing any discussion on this --- hopefully Guenther can chime in.

There has been some discussion of new features for using a laser:

https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenPythonSCAD/comments/1qmwfse/creating_lasercuts_with_pythonscad/

https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenPythonSCAD/comments/1qsg4my/more_lasercut_progress/

I'm sure Guenther would appreciate any sort of feedback you might be able to offer and might even want feature requests (no laser here, so can't help much)

My own approach has been to model in parallel both for 3D and 2D and write out a DXF --- this affords total control, but is kind of clunky:

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview/blob/main/gcpcutdxf.py

(I converted that or a similar file to an SVG --- could that be what you are thinking?)

Maybe there is information at:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pythonscad/pythonscad/refs/heads/master/libraries/python/openscad.pyi

which needs to be added to:

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenPythonSCAD/wiki/index/

William

Maybe I can answer some questions myself:

months?

Nope, 2d colored rendered shapes were sitting around and being
developed for quite some time,
But after they were merged to the main branch, there was no progress on
them anymore

one of the interesting question is: how shall a 2d Slice look like from a
projection cut=True statement.
Main problem here is, that there's no result as PythonSCAD still has
surface colors, once the interior is exposed, there is no information on
its color.

BTW: the correct syntax for cutting is

projection(obj, cut=True)
or
obj.projection(cut=True) ,

however it will not yield a colored 2D

Colored example:
are you referring to:

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenPythonSCAD/comments/1p06hu6/colored_render_in_2d/

And for the laser cuts: they make great progress. Here is my latest demo:

https://imgur.com/a/ZAo6YkW

But please: beware of the API, its not yet very stable, right now it's like
catching a running horse

C U

On Thu, Feb 5, 2026 at 6:39 PM William F. Adams willadams@aol.com wrote:

Thank you.

After posting, I found that I had set up "cut()" as a user defined method
in openscade which included projection(cut=True) and passed it down to the
children.  I now forget why I did that, but it worked in openscad...  I'll
go back and clean up my hacks and see if it works cleaner.  Also, when I
later tried "obj.project(cut=true)" I saw that it worked.  I think I
misattributed the issue.  I had also added "...color("something")" to color
it in the end.

I think I have been using the wrong description for extracting the edge as
a line of a 2D object.  I'll post to the list and see if anyone knows of
that trick.

BTW, part of what I am envisioning is that the colors given to the 3D
laser cut box example <
https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenPythonSCAD/comments/1qmwfse/creating_lasercuts_with_pythonscad/>,
that when it progresses through the 3D object down to the 2D cutout
pattern, that the pattern still either uses the original colors (which
encode the laser cutter parameters), or can be overridden.

Understand on the API subject to change...

EBo --

On Thu, Feb 5, 2026 at 4:03 PM Guenther Sohler guenther.sohler@gmail.com
wrote: