Exporting Sheet Metal parts for manufacturing

Paper drawings are a very useful way of displaying how exactly your Sheet Metal parts will be made, but the initial Flat Pattern will likely be cut out of a larger sheet using a machine such as a laser or plasma cutter. To do this, a 2D file of the flattened part is needed.

There are many file formats for these 2D files, but the two most commonly used are DXF and DWG files. These two file types are both very similar; they are both 2D vector files that create a drawing from entities such as lines and arcs.

DXF and DWG files can often be used interchangeably, but DWG files are actually a proprietary format of Autodesk (the makers of AutoCAD), whereas DXF files are more open source. For this reason, DXF files tend to be more widely used, and in my experience, they work with a larger range of other software and manufacturing machines.

DWG files can be useful if you are working with AutoCAD (because they contain specific AutoCAD information...