DXF Splines and Polylines

[Peter_Witt@adobeforums.com]

Apparently Illustrators hand drawn curves are exported in an AutoCAD spline format for DXF. The problem is our CAD software does not read AutoCAD splines and wants the polylines. I have only been able to find some scripts for AutoCAD that will create a polyline from the unusable splines, however I want to do this in the reverse order and make the splines readable polylines for my software. There is a bit of a 'hack' in the meantime and that is to take a hand drawn curve and goto 'path > add points' until you get enough straight-segments that the relative appearance of the curve remains intact. Then you goto 'path > simplify' with an angle threshold of 0' to get it back to a basic importable series of lines. The problem is I'd like to have 25 tool paths rather than 800-1000 when we run the program on the CNC - producing the true curve and not an overly complex faked version of it.

[Peter_Witt@adobeforums.com]

Followup: You really can't do anything to change the output results from Illustrator. You need AutoCAD/LT to perform these types of commands on the lines.

[Unregistered]

hi, i am having the excact same problem, also for CNC, i managed to make a pdf out of the illustrator vectordrawing and then convert it with vextractor back to vector, that turns out polylines in cad, but there must be a better way, illustrator format already is vector based.
if i try to convert my splined version to polylines the result is not acceptable, hope you found a workaround that works.