Categories:


Archives:

DXF export of FreeCAD Drawing pages

by Yorik on 16.08.2014 in freecad , opensource

I just upgraded the code that exports Drawing pages in FreeCAD, and it works now much better, and much more the way you would expect: Mount your page fully in FreeCAD, then export it to DXF or DWG with the press of a button.

Before, doing this would export the SVG code from the Drawing page, open it in a new FreeCAD document so it got converted to FreeCAD geometry, then export it back to DXF. It gave a lot of errors and was very slow. Now the whole system is based on templates (you need a DXF template corresponding to the SVG template you use in FreeCAD), and the views that appear on the Drawing pages also output their own DXF code.

Of course things are still far from perfect, there is still no support for paper space and many other features, but it is already handy. The template is exported at 1:1 scale, and each view becomes a block, scaled by the same factor as in the Drawing page. So, scaling everything back to 1:1 is very easy too. In the image below I just scaled everything up, exploded, and modified the Standard dimension and text styles, 5 minutes work:

The two default templates of FreeCAD (A3 and A4) already have a DXF version, so you can test this immediately if you use a development version of FreeCAD. Not all views placed on the page will be guaranteed to work yet, but at least everything that is based on geometry, plus Annotations and a couple of Draft objects such as dimensions works.

The model in the first screenshot is my current IFC test house, I'll blog more about it later...

Enjoy!

by Yorik on 16.08.2014 in freecad , opensource