We often see parts come out slightly smaller than the designer expected when they're designed in a vector based drawing tool like Inkscape, Illustrator or Corel Draw. These parts show up smaller in the online quoting tool than they do in the drawing software. This is due to the stroke width of the part. Let's take a look at how this can happen.
In Inkscape, we'll resize a square with rounded corners to be 5 inches by 5 inches and export the design to a DXF format file.
When uploaded to our online quoting system, the size is only 4.902 x 4.902 inches!
What's going on here?
The secret is that Inkscape counts the stroke width as part of the object's size. So if your line is 0.098 inches wide, this increases the overall width and height of the part beyond the center of the line by 0.098 inches (0.049 inches on each side). Our online quoting tool (and most CAD programs) measure from the center of the line, rather than the edge of the stroke.
The solution is to set a very small or 0 line width before resizing. Let's set the line width to be 0, then resize to 5 x 5 inches, and export again.
Now when the part is uploaded, the dimensions are correct.
