AutoVectors Studio

AutoVectors Studio updates from 2026

Everything that shipped in 2026, newest first.

Each entry describes Studio as it was on its date, and later releases have changed some of what they say. What Studio does with your files today is stated in the app itself and in the terms.

  1. Smoother on a nested kit, and one frame around a selection

    v0.32.0

    Dragging, panning and zooming a finished nest

    Studio painted the red overlap shading for every pair of parts whose boxes touched, even when none of them overlapped — on a finished 90-part nest that was 183 pairs shaded for nothing on every frame. It now shades only pairs that really overlap. Measured on a 90-part nest at 1900 px on an Intel iGPU: the time between frames during a drag fell from 22.9 to 15.4 ms, dragging through the pile from 24 to 17 ms (worst frames 47 → 24 ms), and on the demo kit the raster per frame from 35 to 13 ms. Real overlaps still shade red exactly as before.

    Rotating and node editing paint once per move

    Rotating by a corner grip, dragging a node or a handle, and dragging a cut line's end used to paint the whole roll twice per mouse move — once stale, once fresh. Every repaint now goes through one gate and the stale one is gone.

    Dragging with the Autonest panel open

    With the panel open, every mouse move re-prepared the whole kit for nesting (18–46 ms per move). The per-part preparation is now remembered until a part is rotated: 21.9 → 3.3 ms per move on the demo kit, so the panel can stay open while you arrange. What gets nested is unchanged — the run rebuilds its own inputs.

    Opening an .ai file

    Turning the file's bytes into text was done the slow way, twice per file. Cold open of a 3.3 MB CorelDRAW .ai: 478 → 126 ms; EPS in proportion. Byte-for-byte the same parts — the fixture test pins the .ai against its SVG and PDF.

    One dashed frame around a selection

    Selecting several parts drew a dashed box around each of them — with the whole car selected, a salad of dashes. There is now one dashed rectangle around the whole selection, the same frame the rotate grips and stretch handles sit on. A single part looks exactly as before.

  2. The dropdown list is ours too

    v0.31.1

    Every list a field opens now matches the workspace

    The list under Roll, Format, Start of cut, Rotation, Search time and the plotter screen's pickers used to be drawn by the browser in its own grey with a system-blue highlight — the one surface left off the system. In current Chrome and Edge it is now the same plate, corners and shadow as every menu, with the chosen row in cyan. Browsers that cannot style a list yet keep the native one; the field itself is unchanged.

  3. Every surface on one system, and the roll never moves

    v0.31.0

    The rest of the workspace, finished

    The Export and Autonest panels, the plotter screen, the right-click menu, the Save menu, the shortcut editor, the corner-radius panel, the privacy notice, the Gravity controls, the node-editing, symmetry and reduce-nodes strips, and the whole phone layout now wear the same plates, pockets and keys as the ribbon. One primary action per panel, recessed fields with small labels above them, drawn icons instead of typed symbols, checkboxes that match, menus without borders.

    Panels drop over the roll, not onto it

    Opening Export or Autonest, entering node editing, symmetry check or reduce nodes, and the nesting progress line used to push the whole drawing down and let it back up when they closed. They now drop from the ribbon OVER the top of the roll, like the ribbon's own second line does on a narrow window. The drawing stays exactly where it was — through every panel, mode and run. The Gravity card also stays in place while a shake or a nest runs instead of vanishing and shifting the cards after it.

    Smaller things

    Autonest's fields sit on one baseline. Stop keys are amber as intended (a stylesheet order bug had hidden the colour). The phone chip row fades at its edge so a cut-off key reads as "more", the overlap pill no longer covers the ruler, and the More sheet's rows share one weight. Escape closes the shortcut editor even when the rail button still had focus.

  4. Nothing above the roll moves, and nothing yellow tells you what you can see

    v0.30.1

    The ribbon never pushes the drawing and never leaves a gap

    Since 0.29.1 the ribbon kept the tallest height it had needed, so that selecting a part could not move the canvas. On a wide screen that left an empty band under the cards after the first selection. Now the ribbon is one row tall, full stop: if it has to wrap on a narrow window, the second line lies OVER the top of the roll like a flyout instead of pushing it down, and when it unwraps nothing is left behind. The worksheet chips ("4 sheets · 13.6 m film", "Try 470 cm sheets") moved from the ribbon to the footer, where status belongs — on a 1900 px screen the ribbon no longer wraps at all.

    No more yellow strips for things that worked

    "Shake settled the layout 14.7 cm shorter", "Opened … 54 parts", "Saved", "Aligned 3 parts", "Cut out: kept …", "12 parts placed inside cutouts" — all gone. The result is on the roll already. A strip may now say only that something did NOT happen: a file that could not be opened, a shape left out of an import, a nest that found no room, a shake with nothing to move, a Keep that overrode a check. And the strips that remain float over the top of the roll instead of pushing it down.

    The pen is a nib now

    The last one read as a mouse arrow. This one has the rounded back a real nib has, the vent hole, the slit, and a holder running off to the top-right.

  5. The workspace, machined

    v0.30.0

    Commands sit in pockets, not in twenty little boxes

    Every command in the ribbon used to be its own bordered box, all the same weight, so nothing was louder than anything else and "Send to plot" looked like "Demo". The ribbon is now four milled pockets — Roll, File, Layout, Output — with the commands inside as plain keys lit from above, and one filled emerald key standing alone at the end of the run: Send to plot. When you select something, its size, rotation and mirror controls arrive in a fifth, lime-tinted pocket, so the static half of the bar and the half that acts on your selection read as two things.

    One icon set

    All icons are now drawn on the same grid at the same stroke. The Pen tool is a nib — the old three dots on an arc read as dots and a circle, not as a pen. Select is outlined like its neighbours, Measure is redrawn at the rail's size, and the active tool wears a cyan bar on the rail's edge you can find without reading it.

    Gravity says beta

    It still has gaps, so it says so on the card the way Send to plot does.

    Smaller things

    Numbers in fields and the footer are tabular, so a size no longer jitters while you drag. Keyboard hints are drawn as keys. The overlap warning is a chip. Import notes about ignored text and pictures are gone (0.29.2). Nothing moved: the ribbon is 4 px taller on a wide screen, and the Export panel, the Autonest panel and the plotter screen still wear the old style — they are next.

  6. Opening a template says nothing when there is nothing to say

    v0.29.2

    No more notes about text, labels and pictures

    Nearly every real template carries a "TOP" label, a logo bitmap or a dimension line, and none of them is ever cut. Studio used to name each one in a yellow bar above the roll, which pushed the drawing down to tell you something you did not need. It now skips them in silence. The line that said the file had opened in the preview is gone too — the preview is open on the right with the parts in it.

    What still warns, and why

    Anything that means CUT GEOMETRY is missing or that the size may be wrong still says so: a curve left out because its spline type cannot be converted exactly, a shape skipped because its transform could not be read, PLT arc commands that are not supported yet, a drawing whose width and height imply different scales, a PDF where only page 1 was imported. Those are about the cut, and Studio will not go quiet on them.

  7. The workspace stops moving when you select a part

    v0.29.1

    The ribbon grows, but it no longer drops back under you

    On a screen narrow enough that the ribbon cannot hold every card on one line, selecting a part pushed the size, rotate and mirror cards onto a second line and moved the whole workspace down; deselecting moved it back up. The ribbon now keeps the tallest height it has needed at that window width, so selecting and deselecting changes what is in the ribbon and never where the drawing sits. On a wide screen, where everything already fits on one line, nothing is reserved and nothing changes. Resizing the window starts the measurement again, so a window you make wider gives the space straight back.

  8. Across the roll: the job can start at the plotter's edge, and the ruler counts from it

    v0.29.0

    Start at the plotter's edge, or where the sheet has it — you pick

    Two 51 cm squares placed at the top of a 152 cm roll asked the plotter for 1490 mm, because the plotter counts across the material from its origin edge and the squares sat at the far one. The plotter screen now has an "Across the roll" choice. "Start at the plotter's edge" slides the parts across so the nearest one starts at the origin edge, keeping their spacing — the width the sheet needs is then the parts' own width, 515 mm for those squares. "Where the sheet has them" cuts them exactly where they sit, as before. The edge is the default, and on a nested sheet it usually changes nothing: the nest fills the working width, so its parts already reach that edge. Where it does change something is a hand-placed layout, and the last worksheet of a nest when what landed on it does not reach the edge. Along the roll a job still always starts at its first part. The picture and the width check are drawn from the bytes, so both follow the choice, and changing it withdraws the width confirmation. The choice is remembered.

    The left ruler counts from the plotter's edge

    The plotter counts across the material from its origin edge — the right-hand edge as you face a Graphtec, which is the bottom edge of the sheet on screen. The left ruler now counts the same way: 0 at the bottom edge of each worksheet, the width at its top, the grid laid from that edge, and in a stack of worksheets every sheet restarts at its own bottom edge because every sheet is its own plotter run. The footer readout for a selected part says how far along the roll it starts and how far its nearest edge is from the plotter's edge. Nothing moved: the parts, the files and the plotter get the same coordinates as before; only the numbers you read changed ends.

  9. Send to plot takes the whole window, and the picture zooms

    v0.28.4

    The plotter screen replaces the workspace

    Press Send to plot and the plotter screen fills the browser window: the width check and the Cut button on the left, the picture of the cut taking all the rest. "← Back to workspace", the ribbon card or Esc brings the layout back exactly as you left it — same zoom, same selection. On a phone the Export sheet has a "Send to plot" button that opens the same screen, with the picture under the controls.

    Zoom and pan the picture

    Scroll to zoom about the cursor, drag to move along the roll, pinch on a phone; the keys + − 0 do the same, and a double-click fits the width again. At 1280 × 720 the picture is 716 × 460 px, at 1400 × 900 it is 834 × 600 — where 0.28.3 drew a 3.4 m sheet as a 130 px strip in a 1400 × 350 box. The scale, the tick labels and the words stay the same size at any zoom, and the cut lines never move: only the window over them does.

    Fit width, Fit sheet, and what a pixel is

    The picture opens at Fit width: the plotter's full width across the window, the start of the sheet at the bottom, the rest of the roll above to pan up to. Fit sheet shows the whole sheet at once. Beside the buttons a readout says what one pixel stands for — "1 px = 2.3 mm" zoomed out, "1 mm = 3.2 px" close in.

    Re-nest at the number that passes

    A sheet that is too wide now offers "Re-nest at 662 mm" on a plotter that reads 667.8 mm — the plotter's width less the 5 mm edge allowance, and the card says so. It used to offer 667, and a kit re-nested at 667 came back blocked by 4.2 mm.

  10. The picture matches the machine, and you pick the sheet

    v0.28.3

    The plotter picture puts the origin at the right, as on a Graphtec

    On a Graphtec the origin is at the front right — the carriage homes there and the width is counted right to left — and 0.28.1 drew it at the left, a mirror of the machine. The picture now puts "0" and "feed ↑" at the bottom right, the scale on the right, the band of what your sheet needs growing from the right edge and any overflow red on the left, and the caption names the side, so a cutter that homes on the left is obvious at a glance. The bytes never changed: every square and sheet you cut before cuts exactly the same.

    Pick the sheet to cut

    With more than one sheet on the workspace, a row of buttons — Sheet 1, Sheet 2, Sheet 3 — sits above the width check; pick any one and the preview, the width check and the Cut button follow it, with the width to confirm again after every pick. Cut sheet 3 first, skip one, or cut a sheet again after a ruined piece. The test square still comes first on a plotter this browser has not cut with.

    Sent sheets get a tick; the next one is suggested, never forced

    A sheet that went to the plotter shows "Sheet 2 ✓" and stays pickable — its button then reads "Cut sheet 2 again". After a send the panel suggests the next sheet without a tick, wrapping round to the lowest one, and says so when every sheet is done. The ticks last for this browser session and disappear from a sheet you re-arrange, because that is no longer the sheet that was cut.

  11. The bridge installs itself, and the test square says what it is

    v0.28.2

    The bridge download opens a setup window and installs itself

    Double-click the download and a window says what the bridge is, which plotter it can see right now and where it will go — a folder in your own Windows profile, no administrator password. Press Install: the window says "Installed.", the icon is by the clock, the Start Menu gets an AutoVectors Bridge entry and Settings › Apps gets an Uninstall button. Starting it a second time opens a status window instead of quietly doing nothing. Bridge 0.2.0, 10.7 MB, at studio.autovectors.com/bridge.

    The Windows warning, said plainly

    The bridge is not code-signed yet, so on a PC where the file is new Windows shows "Windows protected your PC" with "Publisher: Unknown publisher" — once per download; More info → Run anyway gets you through. The download page now says exactly that and gives the file's SHA-256 as the one check an unsigned file allows. The signing step is built and waits for a certificate; a signature puts a name in that box, and Microsoft removes the box only after a file has a history of clean installs.

    The test square says it is the test square

    On a plotter this browser has not cut with, the panel opens with "Step 1 of 2 — test square (one time per plotter)" and says your sheet comes right after it; the preview is labelled "Test square — not your layout". The skip button for a plotter you have cut with before sits in that box, visible without scrolling, on desktop and phone alike. After the square, a green "Step 2 of 2 — your sheet" box shows the real job.

    Studio tells you when a newer bridge exists

    The bridge never connects to the internet, so it cannot check by itself. After Studio pairs with it, Studio compares the bridge's version with the one on /bridge and says so in the panel; a 0.2.0 bridge shows the same line in its tray menu. Nothing is downloaded or run for you — the running bridge keeps working until you install the new one.

  12. A picture of the cut, the way the plotter will make it

    v0.28.1

    The plotter panel shows the job as the machine sees it

    The plotter's width runs left to right, the material feeds upward, the origin sits at the bottom left — the machine as you stand in front of it. It is drawn from the very bytes that will be sent, so what you see is what the blade will do: mirror, start of cut, park move and all. The width the plotter can cut is the frame; what this sheet needs is the band inside it; anything past the edge is red.

    The panel no longer pushes the sheet off the screen

    On a 1280 × 720 window it used to leave the canvas nothing at all. The controls now scroll inside their own column and the canvas keeps about 200 px, so the sheet stays in view while you decide.

  13. Send the job straight to your plotter

    v0.28.0

    A Send to plot button — beta

    Studio now lists the cutters connected to your Windows PC and sends the layout — the same HPGL the Download button makes — with one press, sheet by sheet when the job is nested onto several worksheets. Beta: the transport is proved on one Graphtec CE7000 over USB in HP-GL mode (it cut Studio's test squares); any other USB or Windows-printer cutter is offered the same file, and the 100 mm test square Studio cuts first is how you find out whether yours takes it. Silhouette, Cricut and Brother machines are refused by name because they only take their maker's software. Works in Chrome, Edge and Firefox; Safari cannot reach a plotter and says so. Download keeps working exactly as before.

    The AutoVectors Bridge, a small helper for USB plotters

    A browser cannot open a USB plotter on its own, so USB goes through a 10.6 MB tray program you download once from studio.autovectors.com/bridge, run, and allow in its own window. It never connects to the internet, needs no administrator rights and installs no driver. A cutter on a COM or serial port needs nothing at all in Chrome and Edge.

    The width is checked before every job, and you confirm it

    Before anything is sent, Studio puts the width the plotter can cut — read from the machine when it answers (a Graphtec reports the material loaded right now), typed by you when it does not — beside the width the sheet needs. Too wide: the send is blocked and Studio offers to re-nest at the plotter's width. Fits: it still waits for you to press "OK, I checked the width". A 152 cm roll cuts about 148 cm once the pinch rollers have their share, and a layout nested at 152 ruins film on it.

    The first job on any plotter is a 100 mm test square

    You press it, you measure it. Both sides 100 mm means the plotter's command mode, step size and origin are what the file assumes; anything else and every part would be off by the same amount. Stop halts what Studio is still sending — what the plotter already holds, it keeps cutting unless you pause it on its panel.

    A picture of the cut, the way the plotter will make it

    The plotter panel now shows the job as the machine sees it from the front: the plotter's width left to right, the material feeding upward, the origin at the bottom left. It is drawn from the very bytes that will be sent, so what you see is what the blade will do — mirror, start of cut, park move and all. The width the plotter can cut is the frame; what this sheet needs is the band inside it; anything past the edge is red.

    The panel no longer pushes the sheet off the screen: on a 1280 × 720 window it used to leave the canvas nothing at all, now the canvas keeps about 200 px and the panel's controls scroll inside their own column instead.

  14. Terms updated

    v0.26.2

    The terms now say which law applies and how copying is dealt with

    Studio is used in every country, so the terms had no business being silent about this. They now state that copyright arises automatically under the Berne Convention without registration anywhere, name the governing law, set out the notice-and-takedown route used when someone re-hosts or rebrands Studio or a template, and confirm that infringement may be pursued in the country where it actually happens. Mandatory protections your own country gives you still apply to you whatever the terms say. Nothing about your licence to use Studio changed — it is still free to use, and your files are still yours.

  15. The last worksheets get packed again once the small parts are out of the way

    v0.26.0

    Small parts move into the earlier sheets, then the tail is re-packed

    When the search finishes, Studio now offers every part on the last two worksheets a free spot behind an earlier sheet's end — free because a worksheet is only ever as long as its deepest part — and then packs those last two sheets again with the room that frees. Measured through the real 14-thread search on three vehicle kits at the default 3.5 m worksheet: 0.74% less film, at a 25-second search and at the default 120-second one alike, better in 10 of 12 runs. On a 157-part kit it is 0.4 to 1.0%.

    Your plotter runs do not change, and neither does your search time

    The number of worksheets was identical in all 24 measured runs — this shortens film, it does not dissolve a sheet. The pass is paid for out of the search rather than added to it: the climb stops early by what the pass needs (20 seconds of the default 120), so the time you choose is still exactly what the run takes.

    At a 10 m worksheet it changes nothing

    The same measurement at a 10 m worksheet reads 0.02%, which is nothing. That is a length you have to type in — Studio does not grow to it on these kits — and the gain here is at the worksheet lengths real jobs are cut at.

  16. Nesting reaches the far end of a long worksheet

    v0.25.0

    A part that would need fresh film now looks at the whole sheet first

    When nothing fitted without starting new material, the packer proposed positions only near the end of the worksheet — for most small parts the last 900 mm, so on a 10 m sheet it never even considered 80-90% of the film. It now re-checks the whole strip, and takes a spot only if that spot costs no extra length. Measured across nine real kits at the full search, on two independent rigs: 1.9% and 2.1% less film on a 10 m worksheet. A 20 m worksheet gains several times more, on a single seed set so far.

    Your layout at the default 3.5 m worksheet is unchanged

    Part for part, identical to before. The same change measured at 3.5 m costs 0.14% and hands one kit an extra plotter run, so it stays off below 8 m.

    Small parts scattered across later sheets are not what costs you film

    A worksheet is only as long as its deepest part, and every part small enough to move sits behind that one. Moving all of them into the holes on earlier sheets was measured three separate ways on nine kits: hundreds of parts relocate and it returns 0.09% to 0.23% of the roll — on one 157-part kit, 48 parts move and the total does not change by a millimetre. The lever on a short worksheet is its length. Studio suggests a longer one when the increase needed is modest; when it is not, raising the worksheet by hand is still the thing that saves a plotter run.

  17. Gravity: Keep the layout you can see

    v0.24.0

    A Keep button, available at any moment of a run

    Stop only ever hands back a layout that passed every automatic check, which is why a run you watched take 16.47 m down to 15.99 m could end with nothing kept. Keep takes the frame on screen exactly as it stands and ends the run. Your eye is the instrument.

    It tells you what you are keeping before you press it

    While a frame passes, the button is a plain Keep. When it does not, it says KEEP ANYWAY and names the worst fault in millimetres beside it — amber for a gap you can judge by eye, red for two outlines that cross. Whatever you keep is written into the notes afterwards, so nothing is ever kept silently.

    Why runs were being refused over nothing you could see

    Measured across five real kits: 189 refusals out of 189 were a single part on the roll's long edge drifting as little as 0.01 mm past a boundary nothing on the canvas draws — while every gap and every other part was clean the whole time. The red outlines are not it; they mark material overlap and were innocent. The automatic checks are unchanged, and the cause is next on the list.

  18. Nesting: no more false "no room in the cutouts"

    v0.23.1

    The cutout search now says when it simply ran out of time

    With "Use part cutouts" ticked, the search for parts that fit inside a big part's cutout runs under a two-second clock. If a busy machine spent that clock before reaching your cutouts, the tool reported the same thing as a genuine miss — "no cutout has room" — which was a claim about your file caused by a timer. On one test kit that hid four usable cutouts holding 26 parts, worth over a metre of film and a whole plotter run. It now tells you the search was cut short instead of telling you your parts do not fit.

  19. Gravity runs faster than real time on every kit

    v0.23.0

    The physics stopped throwing its own work away

    Every time a part moved, the engine discarded and rebuilt its entire outline from scratch — thousands of times a second, tens of megabytes of waste per second. It now writes into the buffers it already owns. Frames are 1.5 to 2 times faster on every kit we test, and the heaviest 147-part kit crosses from 0.64 to 1.05 of real time: even at Full vibration, the simulation now keeps up with the clock instead of falling behind it.

    And every part lands in exactly the same place

    Not "about the same" — identical to the seventeenth digit, checked at four points in three different runs including one with the mouse dragging a part. The speed came from throwing away less, not from computing less.

  20. The overlap warning stops choking the picture

    v0.22.3

    Big kits draw smoothly again during Gravity

    On a 147-part kit the red overlap check was eating almost nine tenths of the screen's time — it re-tested every pair of parts from scratch eleven times a second, so the picture updated about once a second while the physics underneath was running fine. It now measures each part once per sweep and skips pairs that cannot touch: that check went from around 800 ms to about 2 ms. The warning is exactly as strict as before — parts that merely touch still count — and nothing about the layout, the gap or the physics changed.

  21. The sheet unroll stops eating the PC

    v0.22.2

    Sheets grow to follow your parts without the lag

    Dragging a part past the sheet end still rolls the stack open — that stays — but the moment it was rolling, the screen was being repainted up to eleven times per frame instead of once, and every mouse move re-tested all four thousand part pairs for overlap. Repaints now collapse to one per frame and the overlap check only re-tests the pairs your moved part can actually affect: that check went from 46 ms to under half a millisecond. The growth itself — thresholds, rounding, the eased look — is untouched.

  22. One row when it fits, and Shake becomes Gravity

    v0.22.1

    The toolbar uses the width you have

    On a wide screen everything now sits on a single line — no empty second storey. As the window narrows, whatever stops fitting flows onto the next line, group by group, and a horizontal scrollbar still can never appear.

    The Shake button is now called Gravity

    Same button, same physics — the name now says what it does: the layout falls and settles under gravity, and the vibration is the knob you add on top.

  23. A two-row toolbar that always fits

    v0.22.0

    The toolbar no longer overflows on smaller screens

    Selecting a part used to spill so many controls into the single toolbar row that a horizontal scrollbar appeared and half the buttons hid off-screen. The toolbar is now a two-row ribbon of icon cards: the top row holds the constant commands, and everything that belongs to your selection — size, angle, rotate, mirror, cut — fills the second row, which is always there, so the canvas never jumps and nothing ever scrolls sideways.

    Icon cards you can read at a glance

    Every command is now a small card with a clear symbol over a short label, in the style of the cutting-room software you already know. The colours you are used to stay put — Import blue, Export green, destructive actions red — and every keyboard shortcut works exactly as before.

  24. Shake: the red warning follows what is on screen

    v0.21.6

    Parts stop glowing red once the shake has pulled them apart

    The overlap check only looked at where parts stood BEFORE you pressed Shake, so anything that started overlapping stayed red for the whole run even after the physics had separated it — and anything that ran into trouble mid-run was not shown at all. It now tests what is actually on screen, so the warning is true at every moment of a run.

  25. Shake: nothing hangs in the air any more

    v0.21.5

    A part is no longer punished for its neighbour’s crowding

    Parts could stop dead in mid-air with half a metre of clear space beneath them. When one part in the whole layout ended a frame a hair too close to another, the shake threw away that frame for EVERY part at once — on a full kit that was happening in most frames, so the pile fell at a fifth of gravity and clusters simply froze where they were. A refused frame is now refused only to the parts that actually took the space, and a part the crowd closed in on keeps its own fall.

    On the test kit: eighteen parts left hanging became none

    Dropping a whole kit from above an empty sheet used to leave eighteen parts that could still have fallen, motionless, one of them with a metre of air under it. They now all land, and the pile is settled within a second or two. Selection handles also stop being left behind at the old positions while a shake runs.

  26. Shake: nothing starts under the floor

    v0.21.4

    Parts left below the ground line no longer jam or jump

    Put parts well below the roll and press Shake, and they began the run underneath the invisible floor. Each one was snapped up to the floor on its own — so a tidy row got crushed into a heap at the line, some parts jumped 100 mm in a single frame and others sat stuck under the floor for the whole run, asleep and untouchable.

    They are lifted as one block, exactly as they were arranged

    Everything below the line now moves up together in a single step before the physics starts — same spacing, same rows, just above the ground — and then falls normally. On the test arrangement: 14 parts stuck under the floor and 2 jumping became zero of each, with every gap between them preserved. Layouts that sit on the film are untouched, byte for byte.

  27. Shake: Stop keeps what you watched

    v0.21.3

    Kits with parts nested inside cutouts can bank again

    A layout that arrived with a part sitting inside another part's cutout could never save a shake result: every frame was refused over that pair — which had not moved from where it arrived — so Stop handed back the starting layout while the counter showed centimetres won. Measured on a real 90-part kit: 525 of 525 frames refused. Such pairs now pass at their arrived spacing; a genuinely new overlap is refused exactly as before.

    Stop banks the frame on screen

    Saving ran on a timer, so the frame you were looking at when you pressed Stop was usually not the one kept — up to ~10 mm of a win could evaporate in that gap. Stop now gives the frame on screen one final full audit before the run returns.

    The counter says what is kept

    The big number is the raw physics frame and can dip below anything that passed the audit. The bar now always states the kept result — "kept 4.79 m", or "nothing kept yet" — and that is exactly what Stop returns.

  28. Shake: yesterday engine restored

    v0.21.2

    The weight-lean change is rolled back

    Live testing found it worse than the benches said: Stop could lose a win the counter had shown, leaning parts hung without falling, and the physics slowed down. The engine is back to the fast version while the cause is found properly. The lean work returns only once it passes on real kits, not only on test benches.

  29. Shake: full speed with a full kit

    v0.21.0

    A 90-part shake now runs at real time

    With many parts the physics was falling behind the clock, so everything moved in slow motion while the machine ground away. On a real 90-part job the physics now fits inside its frame budget and runs at true speed; a 54-part kit gains headroom, and the heaviest 147-part kit goes from 0.43 of real time to 0.6. Every part lands in exactly the same place as before — the speed came from asking fewer questions, not from answering them less precisely.

    Where the time actually went

    Not the polygon detail — that was measured and acquitted. Over half of every frame was the overlap-refusal machinery re-asking questions whose answers had not changed, and the drawing cache missed on every frame of a turning part and re-flattened tens of thousands of points a second. Both fixed. The nesting gap is enforced exactly as before, and the audited result is unchanged to a couple of millimetres.

  30. Shake: the red capture button retires

    v0.20.2

    The overlap capture button is gone

    It existed to catch one bug — parts sliding out of cutouts during a shake — and it caught it: the frame it saved is what pinned the cause, and the fix shipped in the previous version. Job done, so the button and its live checking are retired. The normal overlap warning on the editing canvas is unchanged.

  31. Shake: parts in cutouts stay in their cutouts

    v0.20.1

    The bug you caught is fixed — thank you for the capture

    The frame you saved showed exactly what was wrong: both overlapping parts were small pieces the nester had placed inside a big panel's cutouts, and the shake had slid them out of their pockets, straight through the panel — one was already 51 mm off the film. The physics sees each part as its outer outline only, so a part inside a cutout had nothing to rest on and nothing stopping it.

    Now they ride their host

    A part sitting in another part's cutout moves as one piece with it — wherever the panel slides, tips or settles, its pocketed parts go along, exactly where the nester put them. Grab one with the mouse and it is yours again: the hand overrides the ride, and you can pull it out and place it elsewhere.

  32. Shake: the overlap warning watches the shake

    v0.20.0

    The warning light now looks at what is moving

    The overlap check only ran when parts changed — and during a shake the parts do not change, only the picture does. So for the whole run it was answering a question about where everything stood before you pressed Shake. It now tests the parts as they are on screen, which is the moment it was always meant to be watching.

    And you can save the exact frame it caught

    When a shake puts parts through each other, a warning appears in the shake bar with the count. Click it and that exact moment is saved as a project file — every part where it was, not where it ended up. Open it, look at it, or send it on.

  33. Shake: it now repairs overlaps instead of freezing them

    v0.19.1

    A layout that arrives with parts overlapping gets pulled apart

    Shake holds parts where it finds them, so an arrangement you made by hand is not shoved about. That rule was being applied to parts genuinely cut into one another too — so if a layout ever reached the shake with overlaps, they were locked in and no amount of shaking could undo them. Now only real overlaps are separated, and they are separated properly.

    Parts sitting inside a cutout are still left alone

    A part placed inside another's cutout looks identical to an overlap when measured, and the first version of this fix threw those out of their cavities. Touching, nested and genuinely-crossing are now told apart properly: only material cut into material is separated.

  34. Nesting: the biggest part gets turned

    v0.19.0

    The search now tries your biggest part at many angles

    A bumper or a bonnet decides how the whole layout falls, and until now the search settled on one orientation for it and never revisited it — it was measured on its own rectangle, with no reference to anything else on the roll. Now most of the search starts with that part turned a different way each time, and the shortest result wins. Nothing to switch on; it is how nesting works from this version.

  35. Shake: pull hard and the pile gives way

    v0.18.0

    A buried part can now be dragged out

    Grab the part at the bottom of the pile and pull, and it works its way up through everything above it — on the test kit, 675 mm out from under five parts in about a second. Before, it moved nothing at all no matter how long or how hard you held it.

    And how hard you pull is how hard it fights

    Pull gently and it strains and holds — 9 mm, which is what a part under a pile does. Pull hard and it comes. Nothing is special-cased: the parts in the way are pushed along the contact, each one only as far as the same rules allow, so the pile visibly works around it. Twelve times more of the pile moves during a hard pull than before.

    The gap is still guaranteed while you pull

    Dragging has never been able to force one part into another and still cannot — the nesting gap holds in every frame of a hard pull, and that is now checked automatically rather than assumed.

    A pile left alone behaves exactly as it did

    This only runs while your hand is on something. With no hand down the shake produces the identical layout to the last version, to six decimal places.

  36. Shake: things lie down instead of rocking

    v0.17.0

    A part landing flat now lies flat

    Until now a part resting on another was held up at a single point, so half the force holding it became spin and it rocked — one test part was still turning gently ten seconds after it landed, and never went to sleep at all. A flat contact is now carried at two points, the way it is in the real world. Landing spin is down 53-fold and that part settles in under a second.

    A part dropped straight down lands where you dropped it

    The rocking pushed parts sideways as they settled: a purely vertical drop wandered 24 mm across. It now wanders under half a millimetre.

    Parts slide the whole way they should

    A part on a slope was only covering about two thirds of the distance physics says it should, because it was rocking instead of sliding. Every slope now travels further, and a settled kit ends up with 5 parts still moving where it used to have 26.

    It goes further, but give it a few seconds longer

    Because parts now slide the full distance instead of catching, the pile keeps finding material for longer. On the test kit it is about 30 mm behind at four seconds and ahead from eight seconds on — so let it run a little longer than you used to before pressing Stop. The engine is also 10% faster per frame, and the gap between parts is guaranteed in every frame exactly as before.

  37. Shake: smoother, and the floor is a floor

    v0.16.0

    The stutter is gone — you were watching half the frames

    With a lot of parts the motion went stop-start. Two causes, both fixed. The engine got 1.5x faster with every part landing in exactly the same place — the same layout to the millimetre, just sooner. And the screen was throwing away every other frame it was sent, so the world advanced one step, then two, then one. It now paints the newest state on every refresh.

    Grabbing a part no longer sags before it pulls

    The pull used to start weak and get stronger while you watched — under one g on the first frame, seven times that a few frames later, which is why a throw looked like it hesitated and then took off. The grip is firm from the first frame now, and a dragged part follows your cursor twice as closely.

    A part thrown along the floor comes to a stop

    Parts that landed beside the roll used to skate sideways forever — thrown at 1.5 m/s one travelled 44 metres and was still going at exactly the speed it left your hand. It now skids 337 mm and settles. Parts still slide freely on each other; only the ground has grip.

    And a part landing flat on the ground stops spinning

    It used to catch on one corner, so half the force that should have held it up became spin, and it rocked. Landing spin is down almost 300-fold, and a part thrown down spinning now scrubs it off against the ground and comes to rest instead of turning quietly for ever.

  38. Shake: no more poking it with the mouse

    v0.15.1

    The pile no longer goes still while it still has somewhere to fall

    Parts could settle, stop dead, and sit there — until you grabbed something with the mouse, at which point everything remembered it was supposed to be falling and carried on. Measured on a loose kit: a pile that had not moved a thirtieth of a millimetre in ten seconds was still hiding 101 mm of film. It now finds that material by itself; the same test finds 3 mm left, which is parts re-seating.

    A part now notices when whatever it was resting on slides away

    That was the whole bug. A part could doze off legitimately resting on a neighbour, the neighbour would slide out from under it, and nothing in the engine could see it — losing your support produced no event. So it hung there, and everything leaning on it was held up by something that was no longer there. Your mouse was the only thing in the program that noticed.

    And the vibration works on a pile that has already settled

    Turning the rattle up over a finished pile used to win nothing at all — the parts were asleep and could not feel it. It now wakes them and wins 79 mm on the test kit.

    The shake takes a little longer to go quiet

    Because it is still doing something. Expect it to keep working for a few seconds longer than before; that time is film. Stop keeps the best layout it saw, as always.

  39. Shake: the vibration is yours to turn up

    v0.15.0

    A vibration control, off until you ask for it

    Shake still does what it did: the view tips, gravity pulls, everything falls as far as it can. On top of that there is now a switch in the shake bar and four levels above it — Light, Medium, Hard, Full — that rattle the whole sheet the way you would rattle a box of parts by hand. Turn it up while the run continues and you see the difference immediately; no stopping, no starting again. It opens Off on every run.

    Medium is the good setting, and it is where the switch opens

    The levels are not guesses. Each was run on a real 54-part kit: Medium wins 337 mm against 284 mm with the vibration off, and it is also the calmest — the pile comes to rest fastest there. Full is legal and nothing scatters, but it wins about 12 mm less and keeps creeping afterwards. The readout tells you how far the sheet is actually being rocked, in millimetres, rather than a number that means nothing on a shop floor.

    It cannot be turned up far enough to break anything

    The top of the range is nearly five times below the first setting where the physics starts to strain. Across the whole sweep the gap between parts was never once breached, nothing was ever thrown off the film, and no layout was ever refused.

    And the screen no longer trembles when nothing is moving

    The visible shake had a hidden minimum, so the scene jittered a fraction of a pixel even with the physics perfectly still — which made it impossible to tell by eye whether anything was happening. Off now looks off, and how much the picture shakes is exactly how hard the parts are being shaken.

  40. Shake: a heap of ice cubes

    v0.14.3

    Parts are properly slippery now

    Set a part down on a base tilted one degree and it slides. It used to need a twenty-degree slope to move at all, and even then it moved erratically — on a three degree slope it crept 73 mm, on five degrees it crept 2 mm. Now it runs 430 mm at one degree and 1291 mm at three, and the steeper the slope the further it goes. Anywhere there is somewhere to slide, everything slides.

    A part thrown in the air moves at full speed

    Throwing a part beside the roll used to look like slow motion that caught up afterwards: the engine capped how far anything could travel per frame, whether it was buried in the pile or alone in empty space, so a falling part painted less and less of the speed it actually had. Free flight now tracks real gravity to within half a percent, and a spinning part travels just as far as one that is not.

    And the shake saves a little more

    285 mm on the test kit, against 268 mm before — a pile that slides settles further than one that catches. The gap is still guaranteed in every frame.

  41. Shake: parts slide again

    v0.14.2

    Parts slide past each other instead of catching

    Pull a door left and it slides along the roof panel rather than gluing itself to it. When a part ended a frame touching its neighbour, the whole of that frame's movement was being thrown away — sideways travel included — so parts asked to move 4331 mm and were allowed 135 mm of it. Only the part of the movement that pushed INTO the neighbour is cancelled now; sliding along it survives, and friction is what slows it down.

    Nothing is left hanging in mid-air

    A long part could be left leaning with clear film beneath it, waiting for something to nudge it. On a full kit the worst part left hanging over empty space went from 393 mm of clear air to 8 mm, and parts with more than 20 mm of room to fall went from two to none.

    A second finger cannot steal the part you are holding

    Once you have a part, that grab belongs to the pointer that made it: a stray touch can no longer re-aim it, steer it, or drop it. The rest of the roll also stays asleep while you drag — only the parts your part can actually push wake up.

    And it wins more material

    On the same test kit the shake now banks 276 mm where it banked 37 mm, because a pile that can slide settles further than one that jams.

  42. Shake: the gap is a wall

    v0.14.1

    Your gap is now a wall the shake cannot push through

    Every part is surrounded by an invisible barrier half your gap thick, and the shake bangs parts against it and slides them along it but never through it. This is a correction: the first release compacted the pile by quietly pressing parts together — on a 54-part kit, 43 to 55 pairs ended up 0.007 mm apart where the gap called for 3.5 mm. Nothing overlapped, but nothing was cuttable either, which is why Stop kept refusing to give you the result. Savings are smaller now and every millimetre of them is real.

    Stop keeps the layout you were watching

    The frame on screen is the frame that gets banked — not a version of it adjusted afterwards. If the counter says you saved 4 cm, you saved 4 cm.

    The gap is remembered from your nest

    A kit nested at 5 mm stays a 5 mm kit however hard it is shaken, even if you have since set the panel to 2 to line something up by hand. A layout you arranged yourself, with no nesting behind it, gets a 2 mm floor — and any two parts you had already pushed together are left exactly where you put them.

  43. Shake: your layout, under real gravity

    v0.14.0

    Press Shake and watch the roll settle

    The view tips on its side so the roll stands upright, every part gains weight, and the whole sheet is shaken like a jar. Parts fall, tip over, slide into the gaps below them and pack down — with your gap setting and the film edges respected in every single frame. The roll length counts down live, and Stop keeps the best state seen.

    Real physics, not an animation

    Each part now has a centre of gravity and a moment of inertia worked out from its own outline. Gravity is an acceleration, so a drop starts slow and gathers speed; a long strip standing on its end leans, tips faster as it goes, and lands; a part that falls on another passes its momentum on. Nothing is ever allowed to lie inside anything else — a move that cannot stay clear is refused instead of shown.

    Drag any part with the mouse while it shakes

    Grab a part anywhere on its shape and it hangs from that point like a bearing, swinging under its own weight. Pull, and the parts in the way are shoved aside by contact — the further you stretch the line to the cursor, the harder it pulls, like a rubber band. Let go and it drops back into the pile. Parts can be carried between sheets this way too.

    The work area rolls open, and back up

    Push a part past the end of the sheet and the material unrolls to meet it; pull it back and the roll winds up again, never shorter than the sheet length you chose. Shaking with parts standing off the roll asks first, then carries them onto the film.

    Shake on the phone too

    The Shake button sits in the bottom bar next to Nest, and the same physics runs under your finger.

  44. Draw your own shapes, and weld parts into one

    v0.13.0

    The pen tool draws shapes from nothing

    Click to place corners, click-and-drag to pull a curve, hold Ctrl for a hard straight line — the same grammar as the pen in CorelDRAW or Illustrator. Nothing you have already drawn ever reshapes itself while you keep going: the line on screen is the line that gets cut. Closing the shape back on its lit-up first point fills it, ready to cut.

    One step back, never the whole path

    Z takes back one point at a time and Ctrl+Shift+Z puts it back — even after you took back the last one. Pressing on a corner you already placed and dragging pulls a curve out of it, so a straight edge can be bent after the fact.

    Merge: weld overlapping parts, or make several move as one

    Select several parts, right-click, Merge. Parts that overlap weld into one outline; parts that do not touch keep their exact shapes but select, move, rotate and nest as one. Two pieces butted edge to edge keep the cut line between them, and Break apart is the way back.

    Rulers can be locked in place

    Right-click a measurement and lock it, the same way parts lock: its ends refuse the drag and Delete passes it by until the same menu unlocks it. A reference distance survives the rest of the layout work.

    Corner resizing stays under your hand

    Grabbing a corner handle with Ctrl scaled the part around the wrong point, so it drifted away from the cursor as you dragged. It scales around the opposite corner now and follows the hand exactly.

  45. Studio opens showing you where to start

    v0.11.6

    The preview panel is there from the first second

    It used to appear only after you had already opened a file — the one place the job starts was the one place not on screen. It now sits on the right from the moment Studio loads, empty, with a button that opens your template and the formats it accepts spelled out.

    Shift+click to select several parts

    The shortcut nobody could find is now the first thing in the status bar along the bottom, with the keys drawn as keys. Shift and not Ctrl, the same as CorelDRAW and Illustrator. In the preview panel, Ctrl+click picks several — that one is named in the panel's own header.

    The resize bar no longer seizes up

    Leaving Studio for another window and coming back could leave the preview's edge refusing to slide until you collapsed and reopened the panel. It holds on to nothing across a window switch now, and a drag interrupted by one ends cleanly instead of hanging.

  46. The part you add starts under your cursor

    v0.11.5

    No more jump from the middle of the screen

    Adding a part from the preview used to park it in the centre of the workspace while your hand was still over on the right, so it leapt to the pointer the moment you moved. It now waits at the edge of the material level with your cursor and slides in with you — nothing teleports.

    Drag the bar, press the button

    The preview's edge is two controls and the cursor tells you which one you are on: resize arrows over the bar, a hand over the chevron. Clicking the bar no longer folds the panel away either, so a resize that barely travelled cannot collapse it by accident.

  47. Double-click a part to send it straight to the roll

    v0.11.4

    A shortcut past the Add button

    Double-click (or double-tap) any part in the preview and it goes onto your cursor immediately — no need to select it and then press Add. Two slow clicks still just select, so nothing is added by accident.

    You can actually see the collapse handle now

    The chevron on the preview's edge was nearly invisible against the dark chrome. It is lit in the brand cyan and brightens as you approach it, both when the panel is open and when it is folded away.

  48. The preview behaves itself when you resize and pan it

    v0.11.3

    The resize bar works along its whole length

    The collapse button in the middle of the bar was swallowing drags that started on it. The bar is one control now: drag anywhere on it to resize, click anywhere on it to collapse — the chevron is just the picture.

    Hold Space to pan when zoomed in

    Since picking parts took over the left button, a zoomed-in view had no obvious way to slide around. Space+drag pans, the same as on the main canvas, and the panel's hint now says so.

    Shrinking the panel keeps the whole template visible

    If everything was visible before you narrowed the panel, everything stays visible after — the view re-fits instead of cropping. A view you zoomed in yourself is left exactly where you framed it.

  49. The preview panel resizes, and its collapse button is findable

    v0.11.2

    Drag its left edge to make it as wide as you like

    The panel opens at its old size, which is now the minimum, and stretches left up to 60% of the window — a whole kit is readable without zooming. The width you choose is remembered on this computer.

    Collapse sits in the middle of the edge now

    The » button was a small thing tucked in the header corner. It now sits at the vertical middle of the panel's edge — the same place and size as the tab that brings the panel back, so opening and closing are mirror images.

  50. The tool rail moved to the left

    v0.11.1

    Pick on the left, work in the middle, preview on the right

    With the preview panel living on the right edge, the tools were sandwiched in the middle of everything. They now sit on the left, giving the screen one reading order. Every tool, shortcut and right-click works exactly as before — the shortcut editor and corner-radius controls now open over the canvas instead of toward the edge.

  51. Pick the parts you need, not the whole car

    v0.11.0

    Imports open in the preview now

    A template no longer unloads every part onto your cursor. It opens in the preview panel, you pick what you need — click one part, Ctrl-click more, or drag a box over several — and press Add. The chosen parts ride the cursor onto the material, and you click where they land. "Add all" is the old one-click behaviour when you do want the lot.

    Add the same part twice

    Each Add makes fresh copies, so taking the same door for a second car is just picking it again. Parts added together keep their layout from the file.

    On a phone it is a sheet

    Importing opens the preview as a bottom sheet — tap parts to pick them, Add, then tap the roll where they should land. The demo link still loads the full kit instantly, exactly as the store page promises.

  52. A template preview panel

    v0.10.0

    See the file beside your work

    Importing a template now also opens it in a preview panel on the right — the file exactly as it was drawn, regardless of what you have moved, cut or deleted on the roll. Scroll to zoom, drag to pan, and the view cannot get lost: zooming out stops when the whole template is visible, and panning stops at its edges.

    One click collapses it

    The » button folds the panel to a slim tab on the edge, giving the canvas the full width back; the tab brings it back. Picking individual parts in the preview and adding only those to the roll is coming next — the panel is the first half of that.

  53. DXF files open

    v0.9.0

    Import a DXF like any other template

    Pick one, or drop it on the canvas. Lines, polylines, arcs, circles, ellipses and splines all come through, and so do blocks — the parts you get back are the parts the file describes.

    Curves stay curves

    An arc arrives as an arc and a spline as a spline, converted to exact Bézier curves rather than traced with a string of short straight lines. A fillet you cut is the fillet the file drew.

    It tells you what it could not read

    Text, dimensions and 3D geometry are counted and reported rather than silently dropped. A DXF says nothing about its own units unless the file bothers to — when it does not, Studio assumes millimetres and says so, because a template quietly 25 times too big is the expensive kind of mistake.

  54. Save asks where to put the file — and then remembers

    v0.8.2

    You choose the folder and the name

    Save now opens the normal Windows or macOS save dialog, so a job can go in the folder it belongs to, under the name you give it, instead of piling up in Downloads.

    After that it just saves

    Studio remembers which file the job is, so every later Save writes straight back to it with no dialog — and opening a job means saving returns it to where it came from, even a network share. "Save project as…" in the menu writes a copy somewhere else.

    On Firefox and Safari nothing changes

    Those browsers have no save dialog to offer, so Studio falls back to a normal download exactly as before. Everything else works the same.

  55. Save and Open are in the toolbar now

    v0.8.1

    Out of the menu, onto the bar

    Save and Open sit beside Import, and Save is in the phone header too. A control you reach for after every stretch of work should not be two clicks deep.

    It tells you when there is something to save

    The button lights up the moment the canvas moves on from the last save and goes quiet again once it is written — so you can tell at a glance, instead of saving twice to be sure.

  56. Save a job and open it again

    v0.8.0

    Your work is no longer lost when the tab closes

    Save project writes everything on the canvas — parts, positions, rotations, groups, roll width, worksheets and measurements — to one file you keep. Open project brings it all back. Ctrl+S and Ctrl+O, or the menu. Dragging a saved .json onto the canvas opens it too.

    The file is yours, and it is exact

    It is plain JSON on your own machine — nothing is uploaded, and no account is involved. Nothing is rounded on the way in or out: saving a kit, reopening it and saving again produces a byte-for-byte identical file, so a template cannot drift by being stored.

    And Studio now warns you before the work goes

    Closing the tab or opening another project with unsaved changes asks first. A file that is damaged or from a newer Studio is refused outright rather than half-loaded — a kit quietly missing three parts is worse than one that will not open.

  57. You can see exactly where a measurement starts and stops

    v0.7.4

    The ends are marks now, not blobs

    The grip on a measurement's end was big enough to hide the very point it marked. The end is now shown the way a tape measure shows it: the line stops there and a small tick crosses it there, so the crossing is the exact spot.

    Holding one no longer covers it

    The grab ring on a held measurement is thinner and no longer filled, so the line and the tick read straight through the middle of it, with a fine pin at dead centre.

  58. Box-select your measurements and clear them in one go

    v0.7.3

    A marquee now catches measurements too

    Drag a box over several with Select or Box select and they are all taken hold of — crossing one is enough, so a long measurement does not have to fit inside the box. One Delete clears the lot.

    Shift adds, a plain click replaces

    The same rule the rest of the app follows. Right-clicking one of several says how many it is about, so Delete never quietly takes more than it offered.

  59. Two fixes to the ruler

    v0.7.2

    Deleting a measurement now removes it straight away

    It used to stay on screen until something else happened to redraw the canvas — usually drawing the next one, at which point the deleted line finally vanished.

    The end marks are readable again

    The grip on a held end was covering the tick that shows exactly where the measurement stops. The tick is now always longer than the grip, and a held end is drawn as a ring so the line reads straight through it.

  60. Up to ten measurements, and you can go back and change them

    v0.7.1

    Ten rulers, not one

    Draw as many as ten measurements and leave them all on screen. The eleventh is refused rather than quietly replacing an older one.

    Pick one up and change it

    With the Select tool, click a measurement to take hold of it: drag either end to change what it reads, or drag the line to move the whole thing without changing the number. Delete removes it, Escape puts it down.

    Right-click any measurement

    In either tool, right-clicking a measurement offers Edit and Delete — and Edit hands it straight to the Select tool with the ends ready to drag.

  61. A ruler, with numbers you can still read when zoomed out

    v0.7.0

    Measure anything on the roll

    Pick the ruler from the rail or press M, then drag from one point to another. You get the distance, the horizontal and vertical spans, and the angle, in whichever unit the workspace is set to. Hold Shift to lock the line straight; Escape clears it.

    The number stays the same size at every zoom

    This is the part worth having. The line is real geometry and scales with the view, but the reading is drawn at a fixed size on screen — so a measurement across a whole vehicle kit, zoomed out to fit, is exactly as legible as one across a door handle.

    It also follows the part of the ruler you can actually see: zoom into one end of a long measurement and the number moves with you instead of sitting off screen.

    The measurement stays put

    It does not vanish when you pick up another tool, so you can measure a gap and then move a part into it while still reading the number.

  62. Export the whole workspace, exactly as it sits

    v0.6.0

    You no longer have to nest something to save it

    Export has a new first choice: "Parts on the roll" as before, or "Whole workspace — every part, where it is". Import a kit, reduce its nodes, save it, and take it back into your own program — no autonest, nothing skipped, nothing moved.

    Positions are preserved, not approximated

    The only thing that changes is that the whole layout is moved to the origin as one piece, because a negative coordinate is something plotters choke on. Every part keeps its exact distance and angle to every other part, so a template you have not moved comes back out laid out the way it went in.

    And it says when the file is not cuttable

    A workspace wider than your roll is a file for another program, not for the plotter, and the panel says so with the measurement. Choose "Parts on the roll" when you want to cut.

  63. A public roadmap: what is coming, and what has landed

    v0.5.0

    What’s coming, beside What’s new

    A second page at /roadmap lists what is being built next — direct plotting to your cutter, a pen tool for drawing your own shapes, a text tool, and a ruler. Each item says where it stands, and a shipped one links to the release that shipped it.

    No dates, and no pretending nesting is ever finished

    There are deliberately no dates: a date on a roadmap is a promise, and this list is meant to be honest rather than impressive. Nesting is marked "always improving" instead of ever being marked done — there is always a tighter layout — so it names the release it was last improved in and leaves it at that.

  64. Full terms of service, and a Terms link that finds them

    v0.4.2

    The short notice became the real document

    Studio now publishes proper terms of service at /LICENSE.txt, reachable from "Terms" in the footer and from the changelog. Sixteen sections, and the two that matter to you say what they always did: commercial use of the hosted tool is permitted, and files you open stay yours — Studio takes no ownership of them and no licence to train anything on them.

    Rights reserved in a form a machine can read

    The terms reserve text-and-data-mining rights under Article 4(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/790, which only counts when the reservation is machine-readable — so it is also published as /.well-known/tdmrep.json and as an HTTP header. It blocks no crawler and costs no page a single byte; search engines are unaffected.

  65. Studio says what it is: free to use, not free to copy

    v0.4.1

    A licence, where a copier will actually meet it

    Studio stays free to use and still stores nothing on any server. What is new is that it says so in writing: a notice at the top of the code it serves, in the page source, and in full at /LICENSE.txt. Free to use here; no licence to copy, mirror, re-host or rebrand it.

    No framing, no cross-origin loading

    Only autovectors.com may embed Studio in a page, and other sites can no longer load its bundle from this domain. Nothing about how the app runs for you changes — the whole notice costs 310 bytes.

  66. Every tool has a keyboard shortcut, and you can change them

    v0.4.0

    Nine shortcuts, shown on the tools themselves

    V select, B box select, H pan, R rectangle, E ellipse, C cut, F corner radius, N reduce nodes, S symmetry. The letter sits in the corner of each rail button, and every shortcut now works inside shape-edit mode too — same as clicking the button.

    Right-click a tool to change its shortcut

    Press any letter or digit. If another tool holds it, it is taken and Studio says which tool lost it. "None" leaves a tool with no shortcut, "Default" puts it back.

    Your changes stay on your computer

    Saved in the browser, on that machine, with no account and nothing sent anywhere — the same promise as the rest of Studio. A different computer or browser starts from the defaults. Only what you changed is stored, so shortcuts added in future releases still reach you.

  67. Shapes you draw no longer sprout a ghost

    v0.3.3

    No original-shape ghost on drawn rectangles and ellipses

    You draw a box in order to reshape it, so the dashed "as it started" ghost turned up on the very first node you moved and never left. Shapes drawn in Studio no longer get one. Restore original shape still works on them.

    Imported templates keep theirs

    There the ghost answers a real question — how far has this drifted from the file you bought — so imports, copies and pasted parts are unchanged. A copy of a drawn box is still a drawn box, and stays ghost-free.

  68. Half on the roll now looks like half on the roll

    v0.3.2

    The state in between

    A part was either fully on the material and lit, or not fully on and quiet. But "not fully on" is what you are looking at the whole time you drag something onto the roll, and a panel three quarters landed looked like one lying on the floor.

    The outline is cut at the film edge

    A part that straddles the edge is now drawn twice: the millimetres lying on material get the full bright colours, the overhang keeps the muted ones. Both solid. The boundary is the real material edge, so you can read straight off the screen how much has landed and which side is still hanging.

    Fully placed and fully parked parts draw exactly as before.

  69. The real AutoVectors mark, and a calmer selection colour

    v0.3.1

    The logo, in the header and the browser tab

    Replaces the "AV" placeholder, and Android uses it when Studio is added to a home screen. Served from Studio's own domain — the app still calls nowhere else.

    Selection is easier on the eyes

    The shop's button lime is right for one button and far too loud for a screen full of selected outlines. It is now the same hue at about half the saturation, picked off a side-by-side of six candidates drawn on the real canvas. It keeps 9.6:1 contrast against the background, and nothing else on the canvas wears it.

  70. Studio now looks like AutoVectors, and parked parts stay readable

    v0.3.0

    The shop’s colours, measured rather than guessed

    Studio wore a grey-and-amber theme that belonged to nothing. It now uses the palette autovectors.com already uses — the same near-black ground, the same cyan, the logo’s own gradient on the wordmark. Every colour was read off the live site rather than matched by eye, so the two cannot drift apart later.

    A part off the material no longer turns into dashes

    Dashes chewed gaps into the outline, so a corner fillet or a sensor cutout disappeared into them and you could not tell which part you had parked. A parked part now keeps its full unbroken outline and simply goes quiet: muted colour, fill almost gone. Filled and bright means it is going to the plotter.

    A dashed line on this canvas now means one thing only: geometry that is not a real part, like the ghost showing where a shape stood before you stretched it.

    Colours that cannot be confused

    Selection, parts and overlaps stay three clearly separate colours, and the build fails if a future palette change lets any two drift together. Warnings deliberately keep the standard red: a warning that matches the furniture is one people stop seeing.

  71. Nesting into cutouts, a faster packer, and Illustrator files that open

    v0.2.0

    Nesting into part cutouts

    A roof with a sunroof leaves over a square metre of film doing nothing. Switch on "Use part cutouts" before a run and the packer treats that opening as material. Measured on a 147-part Bentley Bentayga kit: 19 parts placed inside one cutout, 1.01 m² of film reclaimed. Off by default, because not every job wants parts inside other parts.

    Autonest is twice as fast and packs tighter

    Candidate positions now come from how far a part's material actually reaches in each row, not from its bounding rectangle — which is why the pocket beside a bumper used to stay empty. Škoda Kodiaq: 13.78 m → 13.04 m over four sheets. A plotter run is now priced at 500 mm of film, so the packer stops giving one away to save a millimetre.

    Illustrator files open

    .ai templates exported from CorelDRAW carry their artwork in Illustrator's private stream, which is why they used to arrive empty. Studio reads it now, and the same parser opens .eps. Verified against the SVG of the same kit: identical part count, worst deviation 6 µm.

    EPS 8.0 export for Roland CutStudio

    And inner cutouts stay attached to their part in EPS and DXF — ungrouping in CorelDRAW no longer scatters door-handle holes across the page.

    Studio runs on a phone

    Pinch to zoom, drag to move, press and hold for the menu, 48 px targets for gloved hands. Node editing and cut lines included, not a view-only mode.

    Reduce nodes is a tool

    Select any number of parts, drag one slider, watch the nodes disappear. 3,566 → 2,322 on the demo kit, with a keep-shape guard that is measured rather than promised.