It is important to know what unit was used when a drawing was created so as to be able to import it at the right size.

Often, clip art will be done in stroked lines which are not suited to most CAM programs - the solution is expanding the strokes and unioning them: Ī note on units: Most CAD programs store drawings in generic units, rather than a specific measure. Vector drawing uses lines (a straight path between two 'nodes' which are x,y coordinates, one is the beginning, the other the ending), regular geometric forms (defined by nodes which denote each point at which lines meet), arcs and circles (defined by the central point of rotation and the radius therefrom) and Bézier curves (a mathematical description of an arbitrary curve which has four 'nodes', one on-the-path, two off-the-path and one on-the-path) to allow it to express pretty much any shape or form.Ī game to learn about forming such curves: Origin point This is different from most drawing and CAD programs: as discussed here: Ī note on vector drawing: Vector drawing is like to drafting with rules, triangles, compasses and a French curve, while pixel editing is more akin to colouring in spaces on a grid.

This page focuses on interactive programs, manipulation of numbers/parameters and code is covered on the Programming page.Ī note on curve approximation: The trivial case with four cubic beziers (one on each quadrant) has very low maximum error, IIRC on the order of 0.1% of the circle radius. The 2D drawing programs listed below were chosen for their having especial support in the form of features or plug-ins to support CAM. if one limits oneself to 2D (one interesting example of this is the use of a JavaScript to generate G-Code from vectors w/in the page layout program InDesign (see IterativePathCuts (unfortunately limited to straight lines) at Silicon Publishing: Resources, forum discussion)). Please note that it is possible to use pretty much any vector drawing program for design, esp. Academic paper discussing this G codes for the specification of Pythagorean-hodograph tool paths. One concern with CAD is a fundamental aspect of their architecture: How are curves, arcs and circles handled? All- too-many programs take the expedient route of representing them as as polygons or polylines.

Open source dxf editor