The complete guide
What is DXF nesting?
DXF nesting is the process of arranging cut parts on a sheet of material so that as many as possible fit in the smallest area, leaving less offcut waste. A nesting program reads the part outlines from a DXF file, then moves and rotates each one into a tight layout without changing its size or shape.
If you cut on a laser, plasma, waterjet or CNC router, nesting is the difference between getting eleven parts out of a sheet and getting fourteen. Doing it by hand is slow and easy to get wrong, especially once a job has more than a handful of shapes.
The tool at the top of this page does it automatically, in your browser. You give it a DXF or SVG containing your parts, tell it how big your sheet is and how much gap you want between them, and it works out an arrangement. Nothing is uploaded anywhere and nothing is installed.
This page is also a plain-English guide to how nesting works and what to watch out for, because a nesting result you do not understand is a nesting result you cannot trust with real material.
How the DXF nesting tool works
Upload a DXF or SVG, confirm the units, set your sheet size and part spacing, press Auto Arrange, then download the nested layout as DXF or SVG. Most jobs finish in under ten seconds.
- Upload your file Pick a DXF or SVG containing the parts you want to cut. They can be scattered anywhere in the drawing, overlapping or far apart. The tool reads the outlines and works out which entities belong to which part, so a rectangle drawn as four separate lines is understood as one part, and a hole inside a plate stays attached to it.
- Check the detected units A DXF can declare the units it was drawn in. When it does, the tool detects them and says so. When it does not, you are asked to choose before arranging, because a part size means nothing without knowing whether the numbers are millimetres or inches.
- Set the sheet size and spacing Enter the usable area of your material and the gap you want between parts. The gap should cover your cutting kerf plus whatever clearance you want for handling.
- Press Auto Arrange The engine places the largest parts first, tries each part at several rotations, and only considers positions where a part touches the sheet edge or a part already placed. A genetic algorithm then reshuffles the order and rotations repeatedly, keeping the best layout it finds within its time budget.
- Check the result, then download A banner tells you immediately whether everything fitted. Zoom in on the preview to inspect tight areas, then export to DXF or SVG and send it to your cutting software.
Features
Automatic arrangement
Bottom-left placement guided by a genetic algorithm that keeps improving the layout until its time budget runs out.
Exact geometry
Parts are only moved and rotated. Nothing is scaled, stretched or simplified, and every arrangement is verified before you can download it.
DXF and SVG, both ways
Import either format and export to either. An SVG of parts can come out as a DXF for your cutter, and the reverse.
Real units
Millimetres, centimetres, inches and feet, detected from the DXF header. The export keeps the file's original units.
Holes stay put
Contours inside another contour are treated as part of it, so a washer keeps its bore and a bracket keeps its mounting holes.
CAD-style preview
Wheel zoom centred on the cursor, drag to pan, double-click to fit, and a true 1:1 view for checking real size.
Honest reporting
You are told how many parts fitted, how much of the sheet is used, and which parts were left out. Nothing is silently dropped.
Nothing leaves your device
All processing happens in your browser. No upload, no account, and no server that could keep a copy of your design.
Why nesting saves money
Material is usually the largest single cost in a cutting job, and it is the one cost you control before the machine starts. Nesting attacks it directly.
The arithmetic
Say a 600 × 400 mm sheet of 3 mm plywood costs 8 units of currency, and a hand-placed layout fits 10 parts. If nesting fits 13 of the same parts on that sheet, material cost per part falls from 0.80 to about 0.62, a saving of roughly 23%. Across 500 parts that is around 90 units saved on a job where nothing else changed.
The gain is largest when parts are irregular, mixed in size, or cut in awkward quantities. Identical rectangles in tidy multiples are already efficient by hand; a mixed batch of brackets, discs and odd shapes is where automatic nesting pulls ahead of eyeballing it.
Beyond material
- Less handling. Fewer sheets means fewer loads, fewer origin resets and fewer chances to knock a part out of alignment.
- Fewer offcuts to store. Odd remnants take up shelf space and rarely get used.
- Faster quoting. Knowing how many sheets a job really needs makes pricing honest instead of padded.
- Consistency. The layout does not depend on who was arranging parts that afternoon, or how tired they were.
Supported file formats
The tool reads and writes both DXF and SVG. Both are converted into the same internal model, so nesting quality does not depend on which one you started with, and you can convert between them by importing one and exporting the other.
What is read from a DXF
| Entity | Nesting | On export |
|---|---|---|
| LINE | Supported | Exact |
| LWPOLYLINE (including bulges) | Supported | Exact, in R12 polyline form |
| POLYLINE (including bulges) | Supported | Exact |
| CIRCLE | Supported | Exact |
| ARC | Supported | Exact |
| SPLINE | Supported | Flattened to a fine polyline |
| ELLIPSE, INSERT/blocks, TEXT, DIMENSION | Skipped | Reported, not exported |
What is read from an SVG
Lines, rectangles including rounded corners, circles, ellipses, polylines, polygons and paths. Path arcs become true arcs, and cubic and quadratic Bézier curves carry across exactly rather than being approximated, because a Bézier is a special case of the curve type DXF uses. Group transforms are applied. Text, embedded images and referenced symbols are skipped and reported, since they are not cuttable outlines.
Before you nest: convert text to outlines, explode blocks, and remove construction or dimension layers in your CAD program. Nesting works on the outlines you intend to cut, and anything left over will either be skipped or treated as a part.
Supported units
Millimetres, centimetres, inches and feet. The tool reads the units from the DXF header, arranges in those units and exports in those units. Switching the display unit changes only what you type and read, never the drawing.
| Unit | Typical use | Detected from DXF |
|---|---|---|
| Millimetres (mm) | Most laser and CNC work outside the US | Yes |
| Centimetres (cm) | Larger sheet goods | Yes |
| Inches (in) | US shops, imperial stock sizes | Yes |
| Feet (ft) | Large-format sheet stock | Yes |
Units matter more than they look. A drawing's declared unit is part of its size: label an inch drawing as millimetres and every part shrinks by a factor of 25.4 when your cutting software opens it, even though not one coordinate changed. That is why the exported file always carries the source file's own units, and why a file with no declared units will not arrange until you say what its numbers mean.
Why browser-based nesting is worth it
A browser-based nesting tool needs no installation, no licence and no account, works on any operating system, and can keep your files entirely on your own machine.
Your files stay yours
Everything runs locally in the page. Your drawings are never transmitted, which matters when the design belongs to a client.
Nothing to install
No download, no admin rights, no updates to chase. Useful on a locked-down shop computer or a machine you do not own.
Any operating system
Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS run the same code, because the browser is the runtime.
Works without a connection
Once the page has loaded it needs no network at all. Nesting continues to work if the shop's internet drops.
The honest trade-off is that a browser tab has less memory and CPU headroom than a native application, so very large jobs are better suited to desktop software. For the everyday case of a sheet's worth of parts, the browser is more than fast enough, and the nesting runs on a background thread so the page stays responsive while it works.
Accuracy: your parts never change size
Nesting may only move and rotate a part. Scaling, stretching, skewing or shrinking a part to make it fit is never acceptable, because the cut piece would no longer match the design.
This sounds obvious, and it is the single most important property of a nesting tool. A layout that fits beautifully but quietly shrank a bracket by two percent will waste a whole sheet of material and your machine time before anyone notices.
Every arrangement is checked before you are allowed to download it. The tool compares each entity before and after placement using measurements a rotation cannot change: line lengths, circle and arc radii, arc sweep angles, polyline segment lengths and curve control spacing. If any of them has moved by more than floating-point noise, the layout is rejected and the download buttons stay disabled.
The same rule governs parts that do not fit. A part too large for the sheet is reported as unplaced. It is never scaled down to make the result look successful.
RickyLaserArt vs SVGnest vs Deepnest
SVGnest and Deepnest are the two best known open-source nesting projects, and both are genuinely good. They solve a slightly different problem to this tool, so the useful question is not which is best overall, but which suits the job in front of you.
| Feature | RickyLaserArt | SVGnest | Deepnest |
|---|---|---|---|
| Browser based | Yes | Yes | No, desktop application |
| No installation | Yes | Yes | Download and install |
| DXF upload | Yes | No, SVG only | Yes |
| SVG upload | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Auto arrange | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Export formats | DXF and SVG | SVG | DXF and SVG |
| Original geometry preserved (move and rotate only) | Yes, verified every run | Yes | Yes |
| Unit detection from file | Yes, mm/cm/in/ft from the DXF header | Not applicable, SVG only | Not documented |
| Runs offline | Yes, once the page has loaded | Yes, once the page has loaded | Yes |
| Files stay on your device | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| True concave (no-fit-polygon) nesting | No, convex outline approximation | Yes | Yes |
| Multiple sheets in one run | No, one sheet at a time | No | Yes |
| Steps to first result | Open page, upload, arrange | Open page, upload, arrange | Install, open, import, arrange |
| Cost | Free | Free, open source (MIT) | Free, open source |
Where SVGnest and Deepnest are stronger
Both use no-fit-polygon nesting, which follows the true outline of each part. That lets a concave shape tuck inside the hollow of another, and for parts such as L-brackets, rings and crescents it produces tighter layouts than this tool currently achieves, because we test collisions against a simplified convex outline. Deepnest also nests across several sheets in one run, and being a desktop application it can use far more memory on very large jobs.
Where this tool fits
If your parts are broadly rectangular, round or mildly irregular, and you want a result in seconds without installing anything, this is the quicker path. It is also the only one of the three that reads DXF units from the file header and guarantees the exported file carries them back, which removes a common and expensive scaling mistake. If you nest deeply concave parts all day, or need multi-sheet output, Deepnest is the better fit, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
Concave nesting is on our roadmap. Until it ships, this comparison stands as written.
Frequently asked questions
Is this DXF nesting tool really free?
Yes. There is no charge, no account, no trial period and no watermark on the output. It is a free tool published by RickyLaserArt.
Are my files uploaded to a server?
No. The nesting runs inside your browser using your own computer's processor. Your drawing is never transmitted, so there is no copy of it on any server.
Do you track anything?
Only counts. The page records that an upload, an arrange or a download happened, so we know whether the tool is working. Each record is a timestamp and an event name, with no IP address, no cookie, no fingerprint, no file name and nothing about your drawing. Nobody can be identified from it, and blocking the counters does not affect the tool.
Does nesting change the size of my parts?
No. Parts are only moved and rotated. Every arrangement is verified automatically before download, and if any dimension had changed the result would be rejected.
What file formats can I nest?
DXF and SVG. You can import one and export the other, so the tool doubles as a converter for nested layouts.
What spacing should I set between parts?
At least your cutting kerf, plus a little clearance. For a typical CO2 laser cutting plywood, 2 mm is a safe general-purpose gap. Too small a gap risks parts fusing or tearing out.
Why were some of my parts not placed?
They did not fit on the sheet at their real size, given your spacing. Increase the sheet size, reduce the spacing, enable free-angle rotation, or run the leftovers as a second sheet. Nothing is ever shrunk to force a fit.
Can it nest parts that have holes?
Yes. A closed contour inside another closed contour is treated as belonging to it, so holes travel with their parent part and keep their exact position.
My DXF does not specify units. What should I choose?
Choose whatever the drawing was actually drawn in. Selecting a unit is a declaration, not a conversion: no coordinate is altered, you are simply telling the tool what the existing numbers mean.
Will the exported DXF open in LightBurn, xTool or LaserGRBL?
The export is written as DXF R12, the most widely supported dialect, and is validated against a strict DXF parser. As this is a beta, please check your first file in your own software and report anything that looks wrong.
How many parts can it handle?
Several hundred. Runs of 100, 300 and 500 parts each complete within the optimiser's time budget of about nine seconds. Larger jobs still work, but return a less refined layout.
Can parts be rotated to any angle?
By default parts are tried at 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees, which suits material with a grain or brushed finish. Tick free-angle rotation to allow 15-degree increments for tighter packing.
Does it nest onto more than one sheet?
Not yet. It fills one sheet and reports what did not fit. To cut a large batch, run the remaining parts again as a second sheet.
Does it work offline?
Yes. Once the page has loaded, no network connection is needed. Nesting, preview and export all run locally.
What happens to spline curves?
Splines are evaluated exactly while nesting, so collisions and spacing use the true curve. In the exported DXF they are written as a finely sampled polyline, because DXF R12 has no spline entity.
Can I use it on a phone or tablet?
It loads and runs on mobile browsers, but the interface is built for a mouse and a reasonably large screen. A laptop or desktop is a much better experience.
Why is my sheet utilisation percentage low?
Utilisation compares total part area against the whole sheet. If your parts only need a corner of a large sheet, the figure looks poor even though the layout is tight. The bounding-box figure beside it tells you how well the used area is packed.
Does it handle irregular or concave shapes?
It nests them correctly and safely, but collision is tested against a simplified convex outline. Deeply concave parts will not tuck inside one another the way a no-fit-polygon nester allows, so material yield on those shapes is lower.
Is this a good Deepnest or SVGnest alternative?
For quick browser-based jobs with DXF files and no installation, yes. For deeply concave parts or multi-sheet runs, Deepnest remains stronger. The comparison table above sets out the differences honestly.
Can I nest different materials or thicknesses together?
Only one sheet of one material at a time. Separate your parts by material and run each group against the correct sheet size.
Why does the tool ask me to confirm units before arranging?
Because a part's size is meaningless without them. Comparing a part to a sheet requires knowing whether the numbers mean millimetres or inches, and guessing wrongly would waste material.
More free tools from RickyLaserArt
Other browser tools we build for laser cutting and CNC workflows:
Fit more parts on your next sheet
Upload a DXF or SVG, set your sheet size, and see how much material a proper nest saves you. Free, no sign-up, and your files never leave your computer.
Start nesting now