STL Converter

The tool has been developed in Python>=3.9 for direct command line usage. Installation can be performed via pip and used through a really simple syntax.

Note: these instructions assume that your Python interpreter is alised as python. If you have configured it otherwise, please use the proper alias.

Installation

python -m pip install stlconverter

Usage

The command for invoking the STL converter tool is as follows:

python -m stlconverter <input file path> <output mode>

The arguments for the command are the following:

• Input file path: the path to the STL file to be converted
• Output mode: the identifier of the output mode for the conversion process (case insensitive)
  • STLB: conversion to binary STL file
  • STLA: conversion to ASCII STL file

Note regarding STL numerical format

This conversion tool does not use IEEE 754-compliant numerical formats. Instead, it uses 32-bit floating point values. This greatly reduces the size of the ASCII variant of the STL format, but it might cause computational irregularities in some specific or complex conversion scenarios.