DXF from Illustrator and Inkscape for Laser Cutting — What Settings Actually Work
The laser cutter doesn’t care where your DXF came from. It cares whether every cut profile is a closed polyline at the right scale with no phantom geometry hiding on invisible layers. Illustrator and Inkscape both produce valid DXF files — just not automatically. Both tools were designed for screen output, not manufacturing tolerances, and that mismatch shows up in specific, repeatable ways. This post covers what actually goes wrong in each tool and how to fix it before your file reaches the machine. ...