Comment 14 for bug 630639

I tested printing from Inkscape on windows by printing to a file (using a driver for a PS printer) and using the PDFCreator print driver. The output was all vector.

Last time I looked at Inkscape printing on windows it was using the gtk+ print API which in turn uses the cairo win32 printing surface. I suspect the problem with laser cutters is that the cairo win32 printing surface uses Geometric Pens for drawing lines (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd183317%28v=vs.85%29.aspx). Geometric Pens are based on the PostScript drawing model where the pen width is fixed in logical units. This allows the line width to vary when the logical to device transform is not uniformly scaled on both X and Y axes.

According to this article http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/vinyl-cutting-on-linux-the-real-deal most cutters use HPGL. My limited understanding of HPGL is it does not support the PostScript drawing model. So for HPGL devices it would be better to use Cosmetic Pens where the pen width is fixed in device units.

The above article mentions some options for using cutters with Inkscape. Alternatively it may be possible to make the cairo win32 printing surface work with cutters by using Cosmetic Pens when the cairo user space to device space transform is a scale transform with the same scale in X and Y.