Plega, a Rigid-Paper Mechanism Workshop from Editable Design to Actual-Size Cut Files
Published:
A paper mechanism is designed flat, judged in motion and fabricated at actual size, and the three usually live in three tools that do not agree. Plega keeps one editable design as the source, moves it as rigid panels, diagnoses what breaks, and exports the cut file at the size the printer will honour.
Design, move, diagnose, cut
Twelve cutwork compositions and six original starters over two restricted mechanism families and up to six separated lanes, edited directly and transactionally on the canvas. The rigid-paper view moves the design as zero-thickness panels; diagnoses are explicit (overlap within a lane, collision, separation); repair proposals are finite, pinned and compared side by side against the original; assembly progress is tracked; export is calibrated PDF and SVG at actual size plus FOLD and JSON, every physical coordinate in millimetres. Two invalid repair cases ship on purpose, so the diagnoses can be seen failing correctly.
What the model says it is not
Rigid zero-thickness panels do not predict material stiffness, fold forces, glue performance, printer calibration or physical assembly success; a lane-bound overlap means uncertified separation, not necessarily a collision; finite repair proposals do not claim global optimality. Each release is recorded with its exact commit, release identifier and the Quality and Pages run that verified source and data, the production build, a locked Chromium, artifact immutability and the custom-domain publication. 105 frontend and 24 Python tests; 14 CI and 14 live browser groups. Apache-2.0 code, MIT design data, Noto Sans under its OFL attribution; separate from its sibling Floraria; the lifecycle stays building.