DXF Output Profiles

An Output Profile is a saved recipe for what your DXF files look like — which geometry goes on which layer, what colour and line type each layer uses, whether bend lines get labelled, whether text gets etched on, and so on. Set it up once for your laser or press-brake, save it, and every export from then on comes out exactly the way your machine expects.

Think of it like a “print preset” for DXF.

Where profiles live

Profiles live in the DXF Export Preview window — the window that appears after you click the green check on the DXF export page.

1. Export as usual (see Export DXF with Custom Names) and click the green check.
2. In the DXF Export Preview window, find the Profile drop-down at the top.
3. Pick a profile to use it, or click the gear button next to it (its tooltip is Edit DXF output profiles) to open the DXF Output Profiles editor.

Whatever profile is showing is the one applied to your export — and it’s remembered for next time.

The built-in profiles

CADshift ships with three ready-made profiles so you have something to start from:

Managing profiles

Down the left side of the editor you have the profile list with buttons to:

• New — start a blank profile.
• Clone — copy the selected profile (this is how you customise a built-in).
• Delete — remove one of your own profiles.
• Import / Export — share a profile as a .json file with a colleague.
• Active (the radio button) — choose which profile is the default for new exports.

Layers — the heart of a profile

Click Layers in the editor’s left list. This is one simple grid with a row for every kind of geometry CADshift can recognise and put in a DXF. This is the big one — instead of everything landing on a single outline, you can send each type of feature to its own named, coloured layer.

Geometry you can put on its own layer:

• Outer contour — the part outline
• Holes — round holes
• Slots — obround / slotted holes
• Cutouts — any other inner cut shape
• Bend lines (up) and Bend lines (down) — separated by fold direction
• Bend annotations — the fold-instruction text (Professional)
• Forming features — louvres, lances, embosses, and similar
• Etch / engrave — etched text and marks (Professional)
• Grain direction — the grain arrow and label
• Hardware inserts — PEM-style insert locations
• Hidden edges
• Bounding box — the material-size rectangle
• Sketches — exported sketch geometry
• Notes — note text

Each row has five columns:

Column	What it does
Entity	The kind of geometry, from the list above (read-only).
Layer Name	The DXF layer this geometry is written to. Type whatever your CAM software expects (e.g. OUTER, HOLES, SLOTS, CUTOUTS, BEND_UP, ETCH).
Visible	An eye toggle — open = put this geometry on its layer, closed = the layer is switched off in the DXF.
Color	The AutoCAD Colour Index (ACI, 1–255). Click the swatch to pick from the AutoCAD colour grid.
Line type	CONTINUOUS, DASHED, DASHED2, CENTER, or PHANTOM — drawn as the actual dash pattern in the list.

As you edit, the Sample DXF panel on the right redraws a little flat pattern in each layer’s colour and line type, so you can see what you’re doing.

Routing Holes, Slots and Cutouts onto their own separate layers (instead of all on the outline) is a Basic feature.

Bend annotations (Professional)

Open the Bend annotation section to write a fold instruction onto each bend — e.g. 1: 90.0 UP R6.0. You build the text from tokens ({id}, {angle}, {dir}, {radius}, {bd}, and more) in a pill editor with a live preview, then choose how the up/down direction reads, the text height, and where the label sits on the bend.

➡️ Full walkthrough: Bend Annotations.

Bend lines — flip and trim

In the Bend lines section:

• Flip flat pattern so most up-bends face up (Free) — mirrors the flat so the majority of bends point up, which is what most brake operators want.
• Trim bend lines (Professional) — shortens each bend line to short stubs at the ends, so a laser scores just a mark instead of cutting along the whole fold. Turn it on to reveal Up / Down (which directions to trim) and a Trim length field.

See Trim Bend Lines for the full walkthrough.

Laser-cut optimisation (Professional)

Open the Laser section (titled Laser-cut optimisation). It removes the duplicate, overlapping inner loops you sometimes get from nested contours, so the laser cuts each edge once. Turn on Filter intermediate contours for laser cutting, then:

• Tolerance — how close two endpoints must be to count as the same point (default 0.01 mm).
• Intermediate contours — Delete them, or Move To Hidden Layer.
• Merge nearby endpoints first — stitch near-miss endpoints together before analysing.

See Laser Cutting Optimization for the details.

Etch / engrave text (Professional)

Open the Etch text section to engrave part info — part number, material, anything — onto the flat pattern. You build the text from <TOKEN> placeholders, and CADshift finds a clear spot for it automatically, avoiding every hole, slot, cutout and bend line.

➡️ Full walkthrough, including how placement works: Etch Text.

Grain direction

If you’ve marked a grain direction on the part, the export draws a double-headed grain arrow with a “GRAIN” label below the flat pattern, pointing along the rolling direction. Marking the grain is a Free command on the CADshift ribbon and right-click menu — see the steps below.

To mark grain: select a straight edge of a sheet-metal part, then on the CADshift tab click Mark Grain Direction (or right-click the edge and choose it). To remove it, use Clear Grain Direction .

Output (units, angle, version)

The Output section sets the technical details of the file:

• Units — Millimeters or Inches.
• Angle convention — whether bend angles are written as the bend angle or the included angle (180 − bend).
• DXF version — R2000 up to R2018, to match your CAM software.
• Default precision — how many decimal places.

Editing one part differently (per-part overrides)

Back in the DXF Export Preview grid, the Colors column lets you override the profile’s layers for one part only. Click that cell to open the same Layers grid just for that part — handy when a single part needs a different layer setup without changing your whole profile.

Which edition do I need?

Locked features show a gold PRO (or Basic) badge and an upgrade note; your other settings keep working as normal.