DXF for CAD

The DXF export gives your CAD team a layered, real-world-scale drawing to take into detailed design.

What you get

From the Export section, choose DXF. The file is the drawing as the sketch view shows it, in metres, on separate layers so your engineer can turn parts on and off and build on them:

• Roads as drawn — kerb lines and back-of-footway lines with the junction radii resolved, shared drives, turning heads, driveways, and footpaths at their real width (two edges, not a centreline).
• Buildings and plots — houses with their roof lines, plot paving, parking bays and their designation marks, fences and walls.
• Landscape — green areas and planting, water, trees (as true circles with their canopy ticks) and library objects as their plan symbol.
• Annotation — text labels and leaders, plot numbers, house-type marks, the north arrow and the scale bar, as CAD text and line work.

It is taken from the view you are looking at: export from a sketch view and the file honours what that view shows and hides. Export from the colour plan and it uses the Master Sketch View. The hand-drawn wobble and shadows are left out — CAD gets the true line. Lines take their layer’s colour, except where the view gives a category a line colour: those lines carry it as their own colour, the nearest in AutoCAD’s standard 255.

Exporting a sheet

If the sketch view has a paper size, the DXF carries the sheet too: the border, title block, schedules, north arrow and scale bar, drawn in model space at the size they take on the ground at that sheet’s scale (an A1 at 1:500 is 420.5 m across). The model is trimmed at the paper edge and hidden behind the title block and schedules, exactly as the sheet shows it. Plot it at the stated scale and it is your sheet.

Text is sized for plotting: on a sheet it comes out at the height it has on the paper; without paper it is sized for the scale an A1 sheet would need to hold the site, and the file says which. A logo or a custom image north arrow cannot be traced, so it is left as a box where it sits.

Model geometry only

Tick Model geometry only in the export dialogue for the previous export — plot and house outlines and road centrelines on the original layer names, with no annotation — if you have a workflow built on those layers.

Include compliance views adds the checks overlay on its own CHK_* layers, the lettered area windows and a 2× detail view of each area beside the plan. It is an addition to the drawing, not a different export.

Terraces in the DXF

Where a scheme has terraces or semis, houses are split across layers by their position in the run — HOUSES_SEMI, HOUSES_END and HOUSES_MID — so a schedule or a hatch can pick them out. Detached homes stay on HOUSES, exactly as before.

A shared party wall is drawn once, not twice. Two abutting houses would otherwise write two lines on top of each other, which reads as a doubled line and stops hatch boundary detection from closing.