I use Rhino for a lot of design and I’m sure there’s other people using CAD.
It seems like there would be a lot of people that would benefit if Glowforge would read DXF files. It’s a pretty open standard.
Yes, Rhino will save in Illustrator (AI) format, but it doesn’t work that well with Glowforge. (There’s sizing and positioning issues so I have to push it through Illustrator itself, first.)
That was one of the formats advertised during the start-up period. A lot of us would like it.
You can use this site to convert DXF to SVG or PDF for the Glowforge:
You can import DXF files directly into Inkscape.
I have noticed that I get double lines frequently, but I’m not sure if that is due to the Inkscape import or the Fusion360 export.
Thanks!
I tried both of these and they both work well.
However, both add a lot of steps into the workflow that wouldn’t be there if Glowforge would just read DXF files.
I really can’t wait for this feature to be released, everything I do on the GF is first done in cad, then to Inkscape then to GF… then normally an edit back in cad
How’s the scaling? I’ll do some tests tomorrow, I haven’t tried it yet. It would make it easier.
i use illustrator. before we could copy/paste directly from illustrator, i exclusively used PDF files. never had a problem. since PDF retains scaling properly, i would presume it should work fine. but i’ll hedge my bets on that a little because i sometimes find some weird page sizes in acrobat when i import CAD (revit) PDFs into illustrator. but it’s certainly worth a try. eliminating a step and an additional opportunity for problems with an extra conversion.
I wrote a quick and dirty go command line utility to convert DXF to svg: https://github.com/jbeda/dxf2svg.
I found that I could do it by transiting through illustrator. But the problem is that DXF doesn’t have any idea about connections between lines. So then you’d have to go in and manually select and create shapes if you wanted to clean it up.
It has been a while since I’ve run it and it isn’t easy to install as I haven’t packaged it up at all. Also no guarantees…
I’m “printing” to PDFs directly in Rhino. As long as I make sure the scale doesn’t change from 1:1 it works okay.
Another PDF user here, but I agree it would be nice to just import the DXF. It’s not hard to convert and as all the heavy lifting is done in the cloud anyway, it should be pretty simple to implement.
well… to be fair, the machine hasn’t been released for three years, just finished the funding 3 years ago.
DXF was on the original spec list 3 years ago and was one of my reasons for funding the machine. I’ve learned to work around it, and would love to have in my options list still.
