Hi All


I've been using inkscape quite happily for years, with my own laser-cutters etc... all good.... but now I'm increasingly having to send files to proper grown-up engineers, and they all seem to use software like Autocad,

So... I need to get files into a format where they can import them without having to manually tweak things. The DXF import (and plugins) from Inkscape don't achieve this terribly well - there are always issues of turning curves into straight-line segments etc... so I figured that what I need to do is export them, then open them in draftsight (a younger sibling to the software used by the engineers), and from that I can export in whatever format they require.

So.... exporting a DXF from inskcape directly produces an hillariously bad import into draftsight. An "O" comes out as a drunken octogon.

I read that the Big Blue Saw creator (this plugin used to work, but no longer does for me) uses Pstoedit... a (linux) command-line tool... seems like that might be a good idea, but when I do



But this outputs an empty DXF file




So... not sure where to go from here.


Any ideas?





Nick

I take dxf files from Inkscape to CAM and CAD fairly often, without much issue and reasonably high precision.

Have you got come example files to share?

Hiya - attached is a file I'm tinkering with at the moment.

If I output that as DXF, then reimport that into Inkscape, it's perfect.

If I try to import it into draftsight, it comes out looking like Flintstones letters... the O has 7 sides.

Maybe it's a resolution setting in draftsite or something.

(goes and checks draftsight)

Yup... if I click



It renders perfectly.

So that's that fixed

Thanks for your help. It might look like a self-fix, but until you answered, I'd given up

Glad to hear you've got it sorted. ::thumb-up::

I will occasionally check files with more than one program; there are a number of free ones (and plenty of spendy ones).

I should also say I prefer to do cad operations in a cad program and use Inkscape for operations that cad can't easily do, but I'll mash the output of either into whatever program is needed to finish the project(s).