2a. .ai / SVG / PDF vector input

kerfmaster pin list · Big capabilities

recordmixedStates what the code does today. Auditable against the code — this is the only type that can go stale.

Content last changed 2026-08-03 — computed from the item itself, not typed.

Contract — Intake stage

This contract describes the code as it runs today.

takes customer-file

makes raw-geometry

fails if A Bézier flattened into line segments; a fit demanded tighter than the format itself carries; a tangent taken from the chord at a corner handle.

Contract last changed 2026-08-06 — computed, not typed. Dated separately from the text above, so neither date can speak for the other.

2 open questions block this pin

Q4 "Strokes only, no fills" -- is that a hard rule we reject a file on, or a preference we heal around when a fill turns up?
Aristide — Carries the guideline as a guideline with no enforcement behind it.
Q5 We tell customers an SVG out of Illustrator is "equally good" and we have no SVG reader. Build one, or amend what we tell them?
Aristide — The record says plainly: "SVG is still unwritten."

Built 2026-08-01. The PDF/.ai reader and the Bézier→arc fitter described here now exist and are measured — see item 2c for what was built, the verified numbers, and the resume point. SVG is still unwritten. The size/units blocker below is unchanged.

A modern .ai is a PDF (EAGLES.ai = %PDF-1.6, AI 25.2; MVT-ICONtest.ai = AI 29.1). SVG is plain XML with the same path ops plus a native A arc command we’d preserve like a DXF bulge. So one front-end reads all three.

The crux: Illustrator has no arc primitive — every circle/curve is cubic Bézier (MVT-ICONtest: a circle drawn as 4 Béziers). Generic converters flatten Béziers into hundreds of tiny lines — the exact ‘polylined curve’ we exist to undo. So the job is NOT ‘convert to DXF’; it’s extract the true Bézier paths and re-fit them into real G2/G3 arcs within tolerance. Ignore clip paths.

What a cut-ready file looks like

Refined from three examples:

EAGLES.ai — clean stroke line-art (angel ornament): 69 Béziers, 259 line segs, 23 closed paths, stroke-only, zero fills → a cut file. ✔
interactivegaragecover.svg — 7,812 filled blobs, stroke=none, thousands of near-black shades: a traced-raster picture, not cut geometry. ✗ (the reject case)
MVT-ICONtest.ai — the MVT logo flattened to a single-color silhouette with knockout holes (play triangle, chart dots, ring interior): 5 filled shapes, no strokes → a cut file. ✔

So the guideline is: a cut-ready file is a clean, flattened, single-color silhouette with knockout holes — fills are fine, even preferred, as long as they’re crisp closed shapes. We cut the fill outlines including interior holes. The real reject criterion is traced-raster art, NOT ‘has fills’.

Customer upload guidelines (documented in CLAUDE.md)

Strokes only OR a clean flattened single-color silhouette — no traced rasters.
No stroke color / thickness — sanity-check with Illustrator outline view (Cmd+Y).
Every cut path closed; holes as knockouts.
Outline/expand all text (Type → Create Outlines).
No doubled/overlapping lines.

Open questions (need Aristide’s call before build)

Size/units — THE blocker. Illustrator defaults to points; art carries a 612×792pt artboard but no real size. Do we tell customers to set the doc to inches and draw 1:1 at actual cut size, or will they always state the finished dimension? Scale must never be a guess.
Cut-vs-engrave via color (future). ‘No color’ today, but stroke color is the natural signal for cut/engrave/score later (red=cut, blue=engrave). Ties to the cut-vs-engrave item.
What to strip. Crop marks, guides, clip masks, embedded rasters — confirm only the visible line work is cut.

Added 2026-07-24; samples EAGLES.ai, interactivegaragecover.svg, MVT-ICON.svg, MVT-ICONtest.ai.