Nesting and Sizing

Every part of every item is laid out on the shared board automatically, and re-laid out on every change. That layout is the sheet you cut.

What the nester does

It takes the full set of pieces — every part of every item, times its quantity — and places them on the board, respecting the margins the stock settings impose: the kept-back edge stock, and whether parts may run to a clamped edge.

If everything does not fit on one board, it fills another. A job can span as many sheets as it needs, and the preview shows each.

Reading the sizing line

Under the preview, the status line reports the job:

parts — distinct shapes in the design.
pieces — how many actually get cut, quantity included.

A three-box design has the same parts as a one-box design and three times the pieces.

If some pieces could not be placed, that is reported too — the job as specified does not fit the board you gave it.

When it does not fit

The nester will not silently shrink anything. Your options, roughly in order of how often they are the right answer:

Use a bigger board. Most often the design is fine and the sheet is small.
Split the job. Cut it as two designs, or drop a quantity.
Turn on Nest in windows. Small parts get placed inside the waste windows of larger ones. Tighter, at the cost of those cut-outs.
Reduce keep-stock margin. Only if your workholding genuinely allows it.

Sheet layout is not yours to place

Placement is automatic and not hand-editable in the general case — it is recomputed on every parameter change, so any manual arrangement would be discarded the moment you typed a number. Design intent lives in the parameters; the layout is derived.

Grain