Cannot seem to import dwg/dxf from NanoCAD, and pasting leaves me with curves that cannot be filled?

[BOLL]

Hello!

As I spent many years in AutoCAD I still do my linework in that. Nowadays I don't have a workplace with an AutoCAD license so I use NanoCAD, which is effectively the same thing.

I bought Designer to colorize and publish my linework, I usually do logos for my own free applications, I have yet to get something to work though.

1. Save as .dwg / .dxf and Place them in the Designer document, it just ends up as an empty object with no lines? I can choose which layer to place, but they still appear all empty.

2. I copy my lines and paste them into Designer, I can see the lines, but when I try to vector fill it just fills the entire bounding box, ignoring the lines. If I zoom the lines do not pixelate so they should be curves and not a bitmap.

I'm kind of at a loss of what to do, but I am also new to the Affinity suite. At a previous workplace I also had Adobe Illustrator, and there I had to export to .dxf for imports to work at all, but here in Designer even that solution seems to be ineffective.

I'm attaching a range of simple test files exported with NanoCAD in case anyone wants to try. I'm honestly not sure how to get around this.

Cheers!

Andreas

test.dxf test_2000.dwg test_2004.dwg test_2007.dwg test_2010.dwg test_2013.dwg test_r11.dwg test_r13.dwg test_r14.dwg

[Hangman]

Hi @BOLL and welcome to the forums,

If you open the files instead of placing them, you have three different import options...

• Selection—chooses the CAD layout(s) or the model to import.
  • All Pages—imports one or more Paper Space layouts if present, excluding the Model space. Each layout becomes a separate artboard.
  • Single Page—imports an individual Paper Space layout if present; you can choose the specific layout from an additional Selected Page option.
  • Model—imports just the Model space (with margins and offsets) without Paper Space layouts.

Selecting Model will open your artwork in vector form which will then allow you to colourise and edit your files. Selecting Single or All Pages is simply selecting the Page Space layouts...

[BOLL]

Ah, that actually works! This is where prior workflows punish me, did not even think about opening something directly instead of import/place 😅 Thanks a bunch!

Something I do notice is that a circle is not a mathematically perfect circle but a big number of linear segments when put in Designer, so I get minuscule leaks all over the place even if the lines meet up in CAD. Searching for a tolerance setting for closing gaps now but I'm not finding one, I guess it is still early days for the vector fill tool 🤔

[Hangman]

1 hour ago, BOLL said:

Something I do notice is that a circle is not a mathematically perfect circle but a big number of linear segments when put in Designer, so I get minuscule leaks all over the place even if the lines meet up in CAD.

Can you post an example of what you see here regarding the leaks?

[BOLL]

I just woke up from a nap, lazy stay-cation mode is enabled. I'm attaching a small screen recording as reference for this secondary issue.