How to read what this tool gives you.

Reading a dieline from this tool

Every flat comes out on three layers, and the colours are the production values, not a house palette. They are the same in the browser, in the DXF, in the AI file and in the PDF.

• Cut — #800000, layer cuts. The knife line. One closed contour per piece, plus any interior relief cuts.
• Fold Line — #0000FF, layer folds. Drawn dashed on screen for legibility; it is a solid polyline in the file.
• Safe Area — #FF1493, layer bleeds. A true offset of the cut contour, not a scaled copy — on every structure except the four newest, where it is currently the outline's bounding envelope grown by the safe area distance. That is never tighter than a true offset and is looser wherever the outline goes concave, which is the safe direction for print but is not the same contour. Each of the four says so on its own card and in the studio.

What the validity envelope tells you

Each generator was solved from dies that sampled a particular range of length, width, height and board caliper. Ask for a size inside that range and the geometry is doing what it was fitted to do. Ask for a size outside it and the rules are being extrapolated — they may still be right, but nothing measured says so.

The studio states which of the two you are in, live, as you type, and names the axis and the range that put you there. It does not stop you. It tells you.

Export formats, and why the DXF is the one that matters

• DXF — AC1024, $INSUNITS = 4 (millimetres), $MEASUREMENT = 1. Curves are written as LWPOLYLINE bulge arcs, so an arc stays an arc instead of being faceted into a run of short chords. Round-trip verified: write the file, read it back with an independent parser, and the worst disagreement with the engine's own geometry is 0.00804 mm.
• AI — opens in Illustrator with named layers and spot-style stroke colours.
• PDF — vector, with one optional-content group per line type.
• SVG — layered, for the web and for quick review.
• JSON — the panel ladder, the fold tree and every derived dimension, for driving something else with.

Checking a file before it goes to plate

Four checks, in the order that catches the most for the least effort:

• Open the DXF and read the units. It should be millimetres with no scaling prompt. If your CAD asks what units to assume, something upstream stripped the header.
• Zoom hard into a curved corner. You should see a curve. A polygon of short straight segments means the file was faceted somewhere between here and there.
• Check the layer names are cuts, folds and bleeds, and that nothing has landed on layer 0.
• Measure one overall dimension against what you typed. It should match to the published deviation for that style, which is on its card.