You can import your own files from other CAD systems into teknow in dwg or dxf format. The format is recognized automatically.
Rules for creating a suitable import file:
The cutting lines must be white. Yellow lines are interpreted as laser marking. Other line colors are ignored. The drawing must be on a scale of 1: 1 in mm dimensions. The drawing should only contain 2D geometry, no blocks and no z-components. It should only contain one workpiece, also no drawing frame or text field. Dimension lines are ignored.
In many cases, the teknow wizard offers you the option of correcting drawing defects at the push of a button. (Color lines white, dissolve blocks, set z-components to zero). Teknow marks points for which no automatic solution is possible. You can then change this manually. As a rule, however, it is better to create a suitable drawing file directly than to correct deficiencies afterwards.
Technical workpieces: Select export settings in such a way that no SPLINEs and no ellipses are generated during the export. As a rule, these curves rarely appear genuinely in technical drawings, but when exporting, circular holes are exported as ellipses or as splines, some programs also display rectangular sections as splines or everything at all. Numerically controled Machines cannot cut either type of curve. These have to be converted back before production, which leads to a loss of accuracy. Bores should not be approximated by straight lines, but should be represented as circles. Otherwise, a very large number of line elements will result from just a few holes. The machine approaches them all individually and accordingly needs a lot of cutting time, which drives up the price - not to mention the loss of accuracy. If there are splines or ellipses in the original drawing, they should not be replaced by too many line elements for the same reason - you may have to experiment a little here.
Design pieces: In the best case scenario, you stick to the same rules as above. However, the accuracy is not in the foreground here, so when converting splines etc. resulting small deviations are tolerated. Alternatively, you can use the teknow wizard to automatically convert these curves into lines. The replaced splines are colored magenta, so you can compare the old and the newly calculated cutting edge and assess the deviations.
Drawings converted from scans: The same applies here: no SPLINEs. The curves must be approximated as arcs or lines. The challenge is to find a meaningful resolution. A drawing that consists of many thousands of 0.2 mm short line elements is of no advantage in production. As a recommendation, the straight length or arc length should not be less than 2 mm. This can be too coarse with fine details - you have to experiment a little here and see whether the result is acceptable for the workpiece.