Polylines - light and heavy

jeremiawuzza

I have been getting complaints from one of my laser cutting customers that my DXFs are not rendering properly on his equipment. DXFs are saved as AutoCad 2000 Ascii so I presume he is using fairly old equipment, and I think maybe his problem is that his CNC is not reading light polylines properly.
Sometimes.

I'd like to make sure DXFs produced for this customer are always set to heavy. Is there any way to select all the polylines in a drawing and set them to heavy? CONVERTPOLY -all- does work but doubles the size of the drawing. Is there anyway to open a drawing and see if an object has light or heavy polylines? It doesn't show up in the object's properties. I am not sure if PLINETYPE -0- is what I want - can I set it to 0 through a specific template drawing for this customer?
Help needed!

ALANH

I did a google so try Convertpoly.

Jason Bourhill

By nature CONVERTPOLY of Light weight polylines to heavy will lead to an increase to file size. That is why light weight polylines were implemented. When using CONVERTPOLY you can just select all your polylines, it will ignore any that don't require conversion.

You can see whether you have Light weight polylines on your drawing by using the QSELECT from the PROPERTIES bar or from the STRUCTUREPANEL.

There are 3 types of polyline. in QSELECT/STRUCTUREPANEL the are displayed as:
Polyline = Light weight polyline.
2D Polyline = Heavy weight polyline.
3D Polyline = 3D polyline.

You may find it simplest to save to an earlier DXF version. Saving to an earlier DXF version should automatically create Heavy weight polylines, as this was the only type of 2D polyline in early AutoCAD versions. This saves you from having to worry about creating your drawing in a particular way.

You may also like to try using DXFOUT. This has more granular options around DXF creation compared to SAVEAS.

Regards,
Jason Bourhill
BricsCAD V22 Ultimate
CAD Concepts