Recently I wanted to prepare some items for laser cutting. The Stuttgart Hackerspace SHACK has a pretty powerful laser with some software that wants DXF as input. Formats more common to me like PDF, SVG or PS are not (directly) supported. I am / was looking at two tools so far: Inkscape and FreeCAD

Inkscape

My current workflow in Inkscape is to create a drawing, then save in Inkscape SVG format.

After importing

Select All
Edit -> Page Size as selection

From there on there are two ways to continue:

• The obvious one is to use the DXF export from within Inkscape. This should usually work, but for some font-related export this did not work for me, so I went to option 2:

• Use Gapplin.app (on macOS) to open the SVG, then in the print dialog use Save as Postscript to export a .ps file, which can then be converted to .dxf via the pstoedit command line tool

  Paint -> Save as SVG -> Use Gaplin.app -> Print as Postscript -> pstoedit

  pstoedit -f dxf_14 ~/downloads/Zeichnung2.ps ~/downloads/Zeichnung2.dxf

On iPAD

There are sevaral drawing programs available in the iPad. Many are rather restricted in the output or don’t support vector graphics at all. I came across Inkpad Libre(https://apps.apple.com/de/app/inkpad-libre/id1522113334) , an older version of the non-free Inkpad, that  Checking the generated DXF CADReader.app can load and display dxf files. If it has issues displaying, then the DXF is not usable and the displaying needs to start again