When you need DXF rather than SVG
SVG is the easy route into Inkscape, Illustrator and most laser software, and it's free here. DXF is what the engineering side of the world asks for. A cutting service quoting for steel or acrylic, a CNC router's CAM software, a CAD program where you want to measure a slot properly or add a hole, an older laser controller that only imports DXF: all of them take DXF first. If a design only came as an xTool project, this page gets it there without xTool Creative Space installed.
Three steps
- Open the project with the button above, or drop it on the page. If it has more than one canvas, choose the one you want under the file name.
- Switch off any layers you don't want with the coloured chips under the drawing. Hidden layers stay out of the DXF.
- Press DXF beside Download SVG, or Download DXF in the Export section. Check the size in the viewer first: that's the size the parts will be in CAD.
How the file is laid out
The file is written as R12 (AC1009), the plainest kind of DXF, so a twenty-year-old CAM package reads it as happily as a current CAD program. We have opened the output in LibreCAD, LibreOffice Draw and the ezdxf library for 90 real xTool projects as well as our samples.
Each xTool colour becomes its own DXF layer, named after the xTool layer, for example L1_Red or L3_Engrave, and drawn in the closest standard CAD colour. Because cut, score and engrave work sits on separate layers, a CAM program can give each one its own tool, depth or feed, and a cutting service can see at a glance which lines go all the way through.
Everything is in millimetres, stated in the header, and the drawing is shifted so the lower-left corner of the design lands on the origin. xTool's coordinates run downwards from the top of the bed; the DXF flips that to the usual CAD convention, so nothing arrives upside down.
Circles drawn in xTool stay true circles, which matters when a shop checks a hole diameter. Other curves are broken into short straight runs that never stray more than a hundredth of a millimetre from the original, because R12 has no Bézier entity. Lettering comes out as closed outlines built from the letter shapes xTool saves with its text, so the CAD program needs no fonts and the text can't reflow. In the rare file where a piece of text has no saved shapes, it goes in as plain DXF text instead, and the page warns you.
What stays behind
DXF can't hold pictures, so photos for picture engraving are left out, and the page tells you how many. QR codes and barcodes aren't in the file as shapes, because xTool draws them when the job runs. Shapes set to fill-engrave come out as their outlines: DXF has no idea of an engraved area, so set the fill again in the next program. Speed, power and passes don't travel either; the layer table here, or the job sheet, keeps them in view while you set up.
Several canvases
The DXF button exports the canvas you're looking at. Batch conversion, part of the same unlock, takes many .xcs and .xs files at once, or a ZIP of them, and writes one DXF for every canvas in each project, with the canvas name added to the file name.
Checking it arrived right
Compare one measurement against the size this page shows, such as the overall width. A few programs disregard the header and treat every number as inches, which makes a 100 mm coaster arrive at 2.54 metres; choosing millimetres when importing fixes it.
DXF is part of the unlock
Viewing, the layer table, SVG and PNG are free. DXF export is part of a one-time unlock that also adds the LightBurn .lbrn2 export, batch conversion and the printable job sheet. Try the free SVG first if your next program reads it.