Hi all,
I see this was brought up back in 2018, but man, having this feature would really help me out.
I create my guitar designs in Illustrator, and export them as DXF files that I open in CC.
I have a set of precise indexing holes in my waste board to allow me to flip boards and machine two sides in alignment, but there’s always something a little funky in the translation.
I recently tried to improve the process by making all of those indexing holes snap to CC’s grid, centered on grid intersections. I want to be able to export that new waste board design and pull it into Illustrator to make sure all of the guitar designs have those identical index holes. But of course the only options are an SVG export, or a PNG. The PNG doesn’t appear to work correctly - the image I pull into Illustrator is tiny and solid black. The SVG -almost- works, but comes into Illustrator too large by a significant percent. I’ve checked that Illustrator is set to 96dpi, and I’ve tried both ‘placing’ the resulting SVG and opening it in it’s own file and copy/pasting into the guitar design. Both are scaled larger than the file I’m placing them in.
Eventually I’ll translate all this stuff into Fusion 360, but I coughed up the cash for CC Pro, and this is really killing me. I’ve tried the ‘c2d - svg converter’ html page mentioned in the other post, it doesn’t appear to work anymore, or at least it didn’t for me. I’ve tried manually scaling down the SVGs to match my Illustrator files and thought I’d nailed it, but when I then spit out a DXF to open back in CC, the scale is off again by enough to be unusable.
Any thoughts? Or better yet, can you either implement a solid DXF export from CC, or give me some control over the SVG export. Right now all I can do is press "export’ and let it do what it does.
SVG export should be dimensionally accurate (just remember to turn off the stupid setting in Adobe Illustrator where stroke width is included in a dimension).
Something is clearly amiss, I’m just not sure where the problem lies. I’ll keep poking around, it’s got to be something crazy simple, and almost certainly in Illustrator.
Ok - still no clue why or where to find a way to make it import perfectly - but I found a workaround.
If you select all the elements imported via SVG into Illustrator and scale them exactly 75%, it appears everything is correct:
Clunky, but probably servicable. I’ll try it with the issue in the guitar designs and hopefully can move forward.
That being said, a .dxf export from CC would be pretty awesome.
I also paid for CC Pro and wish it had a dxf export option. It’s my go to 2d design software.
Currently, I use lightburn to import/export dxf files. Works best to import dxf into lightburn, make any necessary adjustments, then export as svg for carbide create to generate toolpaths. Kind of annoying to have to use another program to bridge the gap for CC, but unfortunately it falls into my workflow nowadays.
Yeah, it’s clunky beyond all reason to have to jump through so many hoops to get something back out of CC to make adjustments in the source designs. I’ve been scouring the interwebs for how exactly to ‘set AI’s default resolution’, and they seem to have gone to great lengths to hide it.
There’s the “Effect/Document and Raster Settings” method, which should work, but doesn’t. I’m still going to try futzing around with that and see if there’s some magic combination, but changing it from the default 300 to 96 made no impact on the size of the imported SVG.
According to a 3-year-old Adobe help file there are two other potential places.
“View/Display Performance” (this is not an option in the View drop-down anymore) or “Preferences/Display Performance” (you guessed it, also not there).
I’ve been mucking around with Affinity but the heavy lift of taking dozens of design files and rebuilding them is just more than my brain wants to deal with at the moment.
Still - DXF out of AI into CC works beautifully. SVG out of CC into AI and then scaled 75% also works beautifully and seems to be the least cumbersome way to do it.
AHHH!!!
Ok - a little more info. I was able to get the “Effect/Document and Raster Settings” to work. I may have neglected to set the SVG file to 96 in AI when I opened it (I thought it would be a universal setting, not per file). Doing that appears to work, but it’s not perfect.
My Alignment Holes in the design are set to 0.251", which is what’s in the CC file and when I open the SVG and do the 75% scale, also is 0.251"
BUT - if I do the Effect/Document and Raster Settings dance and copy/paste or place the SVG into my designs, those same alignment holes are now 0.2491". Not much of a difference, but a difference.
