DXF r14 export contains far too many entities

[Mattia Rizzolo]

Originally reported in Debian, https://bugs.debian.org/908541

Version: 0.92.3

I have a simple SVG file containing only a few circular shapes, which I
am attempting to export as DXF as part of a CNC milling process.
Inkscape creates a DXF file containing many thousands of tiny entities
for this, far more than would be required to actually represent the
shapes. This causes dxf2gcode to get upset trying to load it.
  (see https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=895865 )

I suspect what may be happening is it has far too small a tolerance for
how to cut paths up.

Attached is both the .svg source and the exported .dxf.
For comparison, attached here is the DXF output created by
https://cloudconvert.com/svg-to-dxf which is somewhat smaller in size,
containing far fewer elements, which dxf2gcode is quite happy to load.

[Alvin Penner (apenner)]

not sure what is meant by the phrase:
" DXF file containing many thousands of tiny entities"

- the original svg file consists primarily of 64 circles.
- the file top.dxf consists primarily of 512 cubic splines. That means that each circle has been converted into 8 splines. This is admittedly more than necessary. 4 splines might have been sufficient. But this is not "thousands" of objects.

- the file 'top-from-cloudconvert.dxf' consists of about 25 straight lines per circle, for a total of 1600 straight lines.

the fundamental difference between these two files is that the Inkscape file uses splines instead of straight lines. I suspect that some intermediate software, not Inkscape, is probably converting the splines into 'thousands' of objects. You might want to experiment by sending a single large spline to your plotter to see how many objects you get from it.

[Martin Owens (doctormo)]

Inkscape extension bugs should now be reported to the Inkscape-extensions repository issues tracker. This is to make it easier to fix issues for each of the parts of Inkscape (plus we've been rewriting a lot of code and could do with more eyes on the new code)

https://gitlab.com/inkscape/extensions/

[Paul "LeoNerd" Evans (leonerd)]

Alright; I've reported it over at https://gitlab.com/inkscape/extensions/issues/12

[Nathan Lee (nathan.lee)]

No new activity, just closing issue on for the old inkscape bugtracker (new issues should be reported in inkscape.org/report, Paul has already done so in comment #6)