Cleaning up a customer DXF
Drawings from customers arrive with tiny gaps, doubled lines and polylines pretending to be arcs. GCnester can repair small gaps and duplicate geometry during import. This guide explains what the import does, what it refuses, and what to fix by hand.
Import Tolerance, in the nesting parameters, is the distance within which the importer will close a gap or treat two lines as duplicates. Keep it conservative: larger than the sloppiest joint you expect, and well below any real feature. Zero disables the healing pass; units, format reading and chaining still happen.
Click Import and pick the DXF, DWG or SVG. If the file doesn't declare its units you're asked for them, and the drawing is read in whatever you choose. Several files can come in through the one Import Items for Nesting dialog.
As the drawing comes in, small gaps are closed, duplicate lines removed, collinear segments merged and polylines fitted with arcs, all within the tolerance. The program doesn't keep a cleanup report, so once the drawing is in, check the outline, the holes and one known dimension yourself, and read any import error before you go on.
The outer closed outline becomes the part and inner closed loops become holes. Open geometry inside a valid part becomes a mark. A part with an open or broken outer outline is refused: it isn't a cuttable shape, and raising the tolerance again and again won't make it one.
Every outline has a role: cutting, marking or ignore. Select the part and check each contour; if some geometry has no tool assigned, the status line flags it. The Marking and Drilling Tools pane is a read-only summary of the marking and drilling tools in the job.
In the Items pane, set Quantity and Rotate (Free, Locked, 0/180 or Quarter). Raising a quantity on a job that's already nested adds only the new copies. Suppressed keeps a part in the list but out of the nest.
Questions people ask
Check the file's declared units, or the unit you chose at the prompt, against a known dimension. Some files declare the wrong unit and some are drawn at the wrong scale. Correct the source, or remove the part and import it again with the intended units.