Nov 30, 2020 | Engineering, News, Plastic Machining, Plastic machining services
At JMJ Profile, we pride ourselves on being true collaborators in every sense of the term. If you’re in need of critical plastic machined parts that you’ve already designed, you can easily supply us with that information and we’ll take care of the rest – bringing your vision for a finished product to life in stunning detail.
Regardless of the type of CNC or CAD application you’re using, there’s a good chance that we’ll be able to work with whatever you provide us so that your project can hit the ground running. Having said that, we do get a lot of questions about which file formats are the most acceptable and/or easiest to work with when providing us with your critical design data. Below are a few of the most common ones that we work with on a regular basis.
Our Plastic Machining Design File Formats
One common file type that a lot of our clients work with is DXF, which itself is short for “Drawing Interchange Format.” This is the CAD data file format commonly used by AutoCAD, and it was designed by the people at Autodesk themselves to make it easier to send information back and forth between AutoCAD and other programs. The DXF format first debuted all the way back in 1982 and because of that, we have quite a bit of experience when it comes to working with designs supplied in this way.
Another common file format that we work with is HPL, which is short for “Hewlett-Packard Graphics Language.” It’s a specific type of vector image format that includes printer instructions written in HP-GL, which is most commonly used by plotter printers that draw images via lines instead of dots. Just a few of the programs that use this format include IMSI TurboCAD Pro on Windows and Lemkesoft CADintosh over on MacOS, just to name a few.
Next up we have the EPS file format, which is a particular type of graphics file saved in the Encapsulated PostScript file type (hence the name). This format is particularly versatile as it can be used for everything from 2D vector graphics to bitmap images to even text. It was first introduced in 1992 and it was designed to act as a standard image format that can be used to move images across multiple platforms, which is why it’s still in use with a lot of our clients to this day. It’s commonly used with applications like Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW, Adobe Photoshop and others.
Finally, we have the DWG AutoCAD drawing format – which is easily one of the most common file formats that we work with on a regular basis. This is a proprietary binary file format used to store both 2D and 3D dimensional design data, along with any other metadata that is relevant to a particular project. If you’re working with AutoCAD and never changed the default file format, you’re working with DWG. Note that it’s also used in a number of other applications like DraftSight, BricsCAD, IntelliCAD and more.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that your design is in such an early stage that it hasn’t actually made its way onto a computer yet – and that’s okay, too. At JMJ Profile, we can create your essential parts from a customer supplied sketch or even from a napkin drawing thanks to our robust engineering and prototyping services. But if you’re in the process of designing your parts for plastics machining and need to get that information to us so that work can begin as soon as possible, any one of the above file formats would be the right way to do it.
If you have any additional questions about the various file formats that we work with on a daily basis, or if you’d just like to talk to someone about your own situation in a bit more detail, please don’t delay – contact JMJ Profile today.
