Program settings

General program settings are available directly in the Settings menu and in the Settings/ General Setting dialog box.

Messages

These options allow you to control which warnings are displayed during the sheet metal part searching.

Merged items– warning when there are multiple different parts combined under one item number in BOM. This happens if there are different parts with the same part numbers present. In these cases, AutoDXF deals with the first item only. Quick solution for this is unchecking option for merging parts based on their Part Number in Inventor BOM Editor.

Library parts – warning when sheet metal parts saved in project library paths are found. Those parts have read only access and therefore working with them is limited. Regardless of this setting, such parts are always marked with red color in the list of sheet metal parts. For these parts it is not possible to create or manipulate flat patterns, detect threads and add bending angle information to exported DXF files.

User interface language

You can select English or Slovenian language of user interface. After changing the language, please restart AutoDXF to fully apply the changes.

Auto Save settings

Select this option to automatically save the current AutoDXF settings when you exit the program.

Open Settings Folder

Click the Settings/ Open settings folder command to open the Windows Explorer in the folder in which the program settings are saved.

General Settings dialog

You can access the General Settings dialog by clicking Settings/ General Settings menu item.

Dimension checks

Here you can set maximum allowable values for bend line lengths, flat pattern length and flat pattern width. The components that exceed these values will be marked with yellow colour. In this way you can for example easily identify components that are too large to be manufactured on your machines.

Example - the following picture shows all components with at least one bend line longer than 500 mm highlighted in yellow:

Length Units

You can select the length units for displaying sheet metal thickness, flat pattern length, and flat pattern width. Please try to make sure that all your sheet metal parts use the same part modelling unit and select the appropriate unit here. This will ensure that you get correct units for flat pattern dimensions and thicknesses and that the heights of exported texts are correct.

If the units in the sheet metal parts and the unit selected here do not match, you will receive this warning:

A restart of AutoDXF is required after change of units.

Number of decimal places for flat pattern dimensions and decimal places for thickness are used to define required decimal places.

Select Remove trailing zeros to remove zeros at the ends of the decimal places.

Mass Units

Select units for mass (kg or lbs) and number of decimal places for mass values.

A restart of AutoDXF is required after change of units.

STEP Export

Her you can control the format of exported STEP files. The settings are valid for exporting 3D bended models and also flat patterns to STEP format.

Include sketches for STEP flat patterns enables exporting unused sketches from 3D bended models to STEP files.

Include sketches for STEP folded models enables exporting unused sketches from flat patterns to STEP files.

Select STEP version in the Application protocol menu. You can also set Splice fit accuracy and File extension for STEP files.

Author, Organization and Description are meta data that can be included in the exported STEP files.

Force DXF processing

Enable force processing of DXF files in situations when no processing feature (DXF text, bend marks, bend information or hole/thread detection) is selected. The result of processing is significantly smaller DXF file size.