Yeap - It would be really nice to be this way but developing such a feature like "auto-quoting" would really increase the costs. It might be a little bit counter-intuitive at the moment, but hopefully we'll be developing this soon.
not having an automated/instant quote system totally kills my interest in this; compare with ponoko or big blue saw, upload a design and it will very easily give exact prices for your design on various materials.
You mean their own design software? You are mistaken. Ponoko provides templates of their default material sizes, and that's about all that's required. Oh, you also need to use the correct color path to indicate between engrave and cut passes.
Either way, clearly you're already calculating this value for billing, no? Or are you just using laser run-time for the bill, and estimating that based on the user's guesstimated path length?
Don't you have to calculate price for every job anyway (in case the user lied or was inaccurate), or are you actually trusting their input to control pricing?
I have no idea if it works well, but the SVG spec has a .getTotalLength() method for path elements, which should mean it's possible to calculate the total length in a browser quite easily. A decent JavaScript developer should be able to prove whether it works well or not in an hour or two.
A basic quoting system was pretty quick for me to hack together: a couple weeks or so. However, the tricky part was handling all the subtly different output formats of different software, corner cases, ambiguous geometry, and plain mistakes people make when creating a CAD file.
