DXF Export and Sheet Printing

A finished nesting layout leaves the plugin in three ways: DXF files for the CNC, printed sheet drawings for the shop floor, and a CSV part list. Labels are covered separately in the Label Printer.

DXF export

Three buttons produce DXF:

• Export DXF > Export Individual Sheets - one file per sheet into a folder you choose, named <stock>_sheet_<n>.dxf (or with the sheet name when it has one). Existing files are reported first and you confirm before anything is overwritten.
• Export DXF > Export Combined DXF - every sheet in one file, grouped by sheet size and laid out in a grid with the size as a title above each group.
• DXF on a sheet card - just that sheet.

Preview on a sheet card builds the actual DXF and draws it, with zoom, pan and per-layer checkboxes - use it to check that the right geometry lands on the right layers. One caveat: the preview draws curved edges as straight chords between their endpoints (full circles render correctly). A radiused part that looks faceted in the preview is still exported as true arcs.

What the file contains

Everything is in millimeters, with the sheet corner at the origin. The drawing is split across layers so a CAM operator can toolpath or hide each kind of geometry independently:

Curves are exported as true arcs rather than chopped-up line segments, and a full circle exports as one CIRCLE entity, so holes become a single clean toolpath.

The three output settings

• DXF Profile - R12 Strict (the recommended default) writes the classic AutoCAD R12 entities that every CAM post and old CAD reads. Modern (LWPOLYLINE) writes compact modern outlines and multi-line text, producing smaller files but requiring AutoCAD 2000-era support.
• DXF Rotation - 90 CCW by default, the convention most shop CAM packages expect; set 0 to keep the sheet as laid out in the DXF. Printed sheets follow this setting too, but they also rotate on their own whenever that fits the page better - so a wide sheet usually prints rotated even at 0.
• Placement Origin - Bottom-Left keeps the layout as nested; Top-Left mirrors it vertically for CNCs that start from the top edge.

Each exported result carries the settings of the run that produced it, so exporting an older loaded result uses that run's profile, rotation and origin rather than your current sidebar values.

Printing sheets

Print Sheets opens a Print Settings dialog: one sheet per page or an overview grid (1, 2, 4 or 6 sheets per page), portrait or landscape, and toggles for labels, feature overlays, grain hatching, cut lines, the sheet header and the margin outline. Open Print Preview builds the pages and opens them in your browser, where you press Ctrl+P to print.

Pages are A4 with black-on-white line work: the sheet and usable-area outlines, each part as an unfilled outline with its label, grain hatching, machining overlays as dashed outlines (engravings carry their depth), and a header naming the sheet with its size, part count and efficiency. Part dimensions are not printed - the labels carry the identifying information.

Parts print with their real outlines only for True Shape runs; a Rectangular run prints them as plain rounded rectangles even where the DXF carries the true shape.

The Print button on a sheet card prints that one sheet immediately, always portrait, one per page, with every layer on - it does not use the Print Settings dialog.

CSV part list

Export CSV writes Sheet, Part, Cabinet, Length, Width, Rotation, Mirrored, X, Y for every placement, followed by a block of unplaced parts. Length and Width are the placed footprint after rotation, so read them together with the Rotation column. X and Y are measured from the corner of the usable area - that is, they exclude the edge margin, unlike DXF coordinates, which start at the sheet corner.