I recently bought a CNC machine and have been saving my TurboCad drawings as .dwg's for use in another program that produces the g-code.
Sometimes the g-code that is produced has stuff that is not seen on the drawing - extra lines and such.

I have been told that "save as" is different than exporting to .dwg (or .dxf)    --- the logic goes that  "save as" is not necessarily for use outside of turbocad - but "exporting" is specifically for use outside of turbocad and as such is a cleaner file ( not any residual turbocad stuff )

Is there any truth to this?  and if so - how do I "export" as opposed to "save as"

I was also told that sometimes 3-D drawings can cause issues with producing g-code.  I do not draw in 3-D, but sometimes I may inadvertently hit the wrong key and get some 3-D stuff in my drawing.  Would there be anything about 3-D I should be aware of?

thanks,
Darrell
 

Re: Save As / Exporting
These are just different terminologies that means the same thing. TurboCAD uses Save As, as does SolidWorks. They do not have 'Export' like, say, MoI, which uses Export (but does not have a Save As function). EDIT: Actually MoI has both, but it is under Export that you find the non-native formats. Save As allows the user to save as a new file with the native format.

I can't answer your questions about gcode.

You should also pay attention to the "selection only" subset.  If you select and save as a different format, that new format's written to file, keeping the file open in TC as .tcw, so you've still got access to the part tree and other associations.  Other programs export for that reason: so that they don't lose their histories and methods in their native file formats.

Thanks Murray and Don!