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Around June of 2007 I got offended at how much CAD/CAM programs cost for generating GCode toolpath files for CNC mills. So I did what any insane idiot coder would do. I started writing my own. Most coders would get a ways into it and give it up due to complexity, but I kept working on it. The result is TkCAD, written in 42,000+ lines of TCL code and just a few hundred lines of C extensions.
TkCAD can import and export SVG and 2D DXF file formats, as well as it's own XML based file format.
TkCAD is currently for OS X only, almost completely due to the extensions it uses:
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fontdata, Gets font glyph curves. (Critcl, Carbon only, simple) -
mlcnc_critcl, Speeds up geometry calculations. (Critcl, portable) -
enhimgcopy, Allows scaling and rotation of images. (Critcl, portable) -
Img, Allows loading of JPEG images and such. (TEA, portable) -
MacCarbonPrint, Allows printing under OS X. (TEA, Carbon only, complex)
If you ported the extensions, you could port TkCAD to other platforms easily, other than printing. The mlcnc extension actually has TCL equivalents of its calls as a fallback, but they're much slower. I used to use the tkpath extension, as it makes much cleaner beziers, but it has occasional crashes with complex files. Sadly, MacCarbonPrint and tkpath are both orphaned works, due to the death of the developer.
If running under Wish 8.6, TkCAD supports canvas font rotation. If the tkpath extension is loaded, that is used instead. Finally, as a fallback, the font glyph curves are extracted by the fontdata extension and they are displayed as beziers.