Exchanging Drawings as DXF

DXF is how a Pingendum drawing gets to and from everything else. Import reads geometry from another system into a drawing; export writes yours out for a CAM package, a laser cutter, or someone else's CAD.

Both directions lose something, and both tell you what.

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Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure that:

• You have a drawing open, or a .dxf file you want to open.

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Importing a DXF

File → Import DXF… (Ctrl+I), or the Import DXF card on the Welcome screen. If no drawing is open, importing starts one.

Import adds to the current drawing rather than replacing it, so you can bring several files into one.

The import dialog

After Pingendum reads the file it asks three things:

Units are the setting that matters. A DXF coordinate is a bare number until the file says otherwise. If the file declares its units, Pingendum preselects them and the row reads Drawing units. If it doesn't, the row reads Drawing units (file does not say) — and you have to choose, because guessing wrong between millimetres and inches is a 25.4× error in your geometry.

Gap welding exists because no exporter guarantees that curves which look joined actually meet, and a chain that doesn't meet can't form a closed profile. Welding closes those gaps by moving endpoints together. It does not add constraints — the geometry is merged, not related.

What arrives

Geometry comes in as ordinary, unconstrained entities. There are no constraints in a DXF file to import, so nothing is inferred.

• Coordinates map straight across: the file's X and Y become the drawing's.
• Blocks are expanded into their component geometry.
• Layers in the file become real layers in your drawing, with their names.
• Geometry on a layer named CONSTRUCTION or DEFPOINTS arrives as construction geometry. The match is case-insensitive.

The import report

When it's done, Pingendum shows what happened:

• Imported — a count per kind of geometry created.
• Skipped — a count per raw DXF type that has no equivalent in a 2D sketch. Named individually, so you can see exactly what didn't come across.
• How many block references were expanded.
• How many endpoints were welded to close gaps.
• Any warnings.

The status bar then confirms the total.

Tip: read the skipped list

A file that imports "successfully" but looks wrong has usually had something skipped. The report names the DXF type, which is normally enough to go back to the sending system and re-export without it.

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Exporting a DXF

File → Export DXF… (Ctrl+E).

Choose the revision in the file dialog

The file-type filter is the version choice, and it's a real decision rather than a formality:

Pick R2000 unless the receiving system has told you otherwise. R12's polyline approximation is fine for cutting but is no longer the curve you drew.

What gets written

The drawing exports at 1:1, in the units it was drawn in.

Your layers go with it — names, colours, linetypes, lineweights, and the off, frozen, locked and plot flags. Each entity carries its real layer and its ByLayer-or-explicit colour, so the drawing opens elsewhere organized the way you organized it.

What DXF cannot carry

Dimensions and constraints are not exported.

DXF has no notion of parametric relations, so every constraint you applied and every dimension you placed stays in Pingendum. What the other system receives is the resulting geometry, frozen at the shape your constraints produced.

That's worth planning around: a DXF is a result, not a model. If someone needs to edit the design, send them the .pingdrw.

A few curves have no DXF entity of their own — hyperbolas, parabolas and rho-conics — and are written as sampled polylines in both revisions.

The loss report

If anything couldn't be carried exactly, Pingendum says so after writing the file:

Exported with losses The DXF was written, but this revision cannot carry everything the drawing holds:

followed by a list naming each item. The file is still written — this is a report, not a failure. It exists so an approximation is never mistaken for an exact round trip.

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Next Steps

You now know how to:

• Import a DXF, and set its units so the geometry arrives at the right size
• Use gap welding to close near-misses, and know it adds no constraints
• Read the import report and spot what was skipped
• Choose between R2000 and R12, and what each does to curves
• Predict what leaves with the file — layers yes, dimensions and constraints no

Next: Plotting and Printing