What’s coming to AutoVectors Studio

What is being built next, and what has already landed. No dates — a date on a roadmap is a promise, and this list is here to be honest rather than impressive.

6 of 7 shipped so far, plus 1 that is never finished — see below.

1. Tighter nesting, release after release

   Always improving Most recently improved in v0.2.0 — and we will keep improving it.

   The packer's job is to fit your parts into less film, and every metre it saves is material you do not buy. It keeps getting better at it: candidate positions now come from how far a part's material actually reaches in each row rather than from its bounding rectangle, cutouts in large panels can be used as material, and a plotter run is priced in so the packer stops giving a whole sheet away to save a millimetre.

   This one is never going to be finished, so it will not be marked as done. There is always a tighter layout, and we will keep looking for it.

2. Save a job and open it again

   Done Shipped in v0.8.0.

   Studio keeps nothing on a server, so until now closing the tab ended the work. A job now saves as a single file you keep — on your own machine, on a share, or sent to whoever is running the plotter — and opens again exactly as you left it.

3. Open DXF files

   Done Shipped in v0.9.0.

   DXF is what sign shops and CAD users have, and Studio could not open one. It can now — including the curves, which come in as exact curves rather than being traced with straight lines.

4. Pick parts from a template preview

   Done Shipped in v0.11.0.

   Opening a file shows it in a preview panel first, so you pick the doors you need instead of always unloading the whole car onto the roll. Click or box-select parts in the preview, press Add, and they ride the cursor onto the material.

5. Send the job straight to your cutter

   Done Shipped in v0.28.0.

   A Send to plot button in the ribbon, in beta: Studio sees the cutter connected to your Windows PC, checks the width of the material against the sheet, and one press sends the job. The transport is proved on a Graphtec CE7000 over USB — it cut Studio's test squares; other USB and Windows-printer cutters get the same file, and the 100 mm test square Studio cuts first tells you whether yours takes it. A cutter on a COM port works from Chrome or Edge with nothing installed.

   USB needs one small helper program in your system tray, the AutoVectors Bridge, because a browser on its own cannot reach a USB device. It is optional — Download keeps working exactly as before without it — and it never connects to the internet.

   Still to come: a signed installer so Windows stops warning about a new program, network plotters, and macOS.

6. Draw your own shapes with a pen tool

   Done Shipped in v0.13.0.

   A proper curve tool: click to place a corner, drag to pull a curve, the same way the pen works in Illustrator or CorelDRAW. Studio already lets you reshape an imported part node by node — this is for starting from nothing.

   It is for the jobs no template covers: a one-off patch, a repair piece, a shape you are copying off the car with a tape measure.

7. Add text and cut it

   Planned

   Place lettering — a model name, a shop name, a small badge — and turn it into cut paths that go out with the rest of the layout. Text becomes outlines, so what the plotter receives is the same kind of geometry as everything else and needs no font on any other machine.

8. A ruler for checking a distance

   Done Shipped in v0.7.0.

   Drag between two points and read the distance in millimetres or inches, without exporting anything to find out. For checking a gap, a part width, or how much film is left at the end of the roll.