mangocrazy
Italian V-twin nutjob
- Messages
- 1,164
- Location
- Sheffield, UK
I've been using TurboCAD for many years to produce simple technical drawings to be printed out for bits and pieces I want fabricated and by and large it's worked pretty well. Recently I've needed to produce slightly more complex drawings for items to be sent for laser cutting and was hoping to be able to send my requirements by email using a file format that interfaced with their laser cutting software.
TurboCAD's native file format is .TCW, which is used by absolutely no-one else and is proprietary. They do have an iimpressive list of file formats that the program can 'save as'; the only problem being that none of them seem to be recognised by other applications. I've saved native TurboCAD files as .DWG (AutoCAD/Autodesk native format) and .DXF (widely used Drawing Exchange Format) and neither are usable by the software the laser cutting company uses (Autodsek Inventor).
I even tried downloading a trial version of the latest TurboCAD Professional 2019 software in the hope that the file convertor in that version might work better, but it's still as bad as my current version.
So, does anyone know of a CAD program that can genuinely save files in readable .DWG or .DXF format and doesn't cost a King's ransom?
TurboCAD's native file format is .TCW, which is used by absolutely no-one else and is proprietary. They do have an iimpressive list of file formats that the program can 'save as'; the only problem being that none of them seem to be recognised by other applications. I've saved native TurboCAD files as .DWG (AutoCAD/Autodesk native format) and .DXF (widely used Drawing Exchange Format) and neither are usable by the software the laser cutting company uses (Autodsek Inventor).
I even tried downloading a trial version of the latest TurboCAD Professional 2019 software in the hope that the file convertor in that version might work better, but it's still as bad as my current version.
So, does anyone know of a CAD program that can genuinely save files in readable .DWG or .DXF format and doesn't cost a King's ransom?