Viewing & printing woodworking plans in dxf & f3d format to 1:1 scale

[Wolf Greenblatt]

Downloaded a set of woodworking plans which are in dxf and f3d format. Don't want to be a CAD expert. Just want to print them to scale.

I only have a normal 8.5x11 printer at home. Don't want to go to kinkos if I can tape pages together at home.

Is there a free easy to use program on Windows that reads dxf & f3d files? If they're bigger than a piece of paper, how do you scale them to 1:1 size?

Do you cut with scissors and then tape them together to make the template? Or is there freeware software printing apps that do 1:1 scaling for you?

[Stan Brown]

The free Irfanview can handle DXF files. Probably it can handle F3D as well, but I can't verify that because the file association dialog won't scroll in my copy. (I suspect the problem is this version isn't fully compatible with Windows 11, and I just need to download the latest version.)

If you open the image file and then press Ctrl+P for Print, one of the options in the print dialog is whether to print original size or scale to fit the paper size.

[JJ]

The CAD plugin only support these formats:

DWG, DXF, HPGL, CGM, SVG, PLT.

Don't know why it includes SVG, since it's not meant for CAD. It's just a generic vector based image format.

[Big Al]

Isn't that all a simple CAD design is? Straight lines? In my tiny amount of cad experience I drew floor plans for an Elementary school for them to print. Other than the few text fields for room numbers, it was all straight lines.

[Paul]

This is 3D and Fusion 360 (F3D) is an attempt by AutoCad to divide the community. That means support for the format, is an uphill struggle for the community. Making a new file format, is like making your own walled garden, which is a popular topic these days.

Normally, you might export to some other format, if it had the same syntactic capabilities. Some history might get lost that way.

And no, I don't know a thing about this format, and had to look it up. The F3D is a ZIP file, so if you have 7ZIP, you can potentially look inside if you want, extract a table or whatever.

CAD is more than straight lines. And working in 3D is going to tax your math class knowledge :-) That's for sure.

If you want to fool around with primitives, you can try the Paint3D program in Windows. The novelty last for about ten minutes. Paint3D cannot assign dimensions to anything, so it's useless for any purpose whatsoever. You can't make an approximation of the OPs table in there. The tools are too hard to use.

Paul

[Andrew]

Stan Brown wrote on Tue, 13 Feb 2024 21:49:18 -0800 :

From two years ago it was said only Autodesk software opened f3d files.

"No open source application can open .f3d files." Which means only Mac/Windows Autodesk software can work with this format.

The suggestion then was to open free online Autodesk viewers.

Yet a quick search shows reputed open source f3d viewers too. Paraview: Open3Mod: MiniMagics: Magics: Netfabb: While a viewer doth not make an editor, Github has an F3D viewer: A zillion confusing packages for Windows are apparently over here: But what is a Windows "WHL" file that they put near the top for you? Name: f3d-2.3.0-cp310-cp310-win_amd64.whl Size: 16642339 bytes (15 MiB) SHA256: F5A002390CC7BDC9932F93ECF189FB57DF1CF94AA43B8415AC4038C82DC0F29E

Whatever a "WHL" file is, at the very bottom are Windows ZIP & EXE files. Name: F3D-2.3.0-Windows-x86_64.exe Size: 17520073 bytes (16 MiB) SHA256: EA210AC271371551A521C0310E7EC2F02FAFA4004F8F2DAB6056EB9EDF107EE7

Name: F3D-2.3.0-Windows-x86_64.zip Size: 24063682 bytes (22 MiB) SHA256: DF47EDDC5AD8836794E343546874FE25739E090466F7F6C912D680F454FEEBAF

The OP may try to import F3D and export something not walled off, but others have tried it according to the search below, and failed.

I don't see why it would fail though. Maybe Blender?

[Bill Powell]

Since a table or chair or whatever is likely to be larger than a single piece of paper, there are three ways I've successfully scissored prints.

A. Acrobat will print to scale with multiple pages and alignment marks B. So will Posterazor

C. As does The Rasterbator

Best, surprisingly, is probably the Adobe Acrobat payware but Posterazor freeware works well (better than The Rasterbator, which is rather old).

[Big Al]

See, that's how much I know. Thanks.