OSM → CDR/DWG/STL: serving signage designers, CAD engineers and makers
Posted by no87xis on 27 July 2026 in English.Hi! For the last few years I’ve been building a service that exports OSM data into formats that live outside the GIS world: CorelDRAW (CDR), AutoCAD (DWG/DXF), SVG for illustrators, STL for 3D printing. It turns out the most grateful audience for OSM data isn’t cartographers at all: it’s signage designers who need a neighbourhood map as curves, civil engineers who need a DWG base plan, laser-engraving makers cutting city maps from DXF.
The main pain I had to solve was keeping LAYERS: roads, buildings and water should arrive in CorelDRAW as separate editable layers, not as one pile of curves. Every export is assembled from the same thematic groups OSM itself thinks in — roads, buildings, water, greenery, land use, POIs — and each group becomes a named layer of the target application: you can hide, recolour or delete it in one move instead of picking objects one by one. Street labels live on their own layer too — a signage designer usually wants them, a laser engraver almost never does.
The second pain is the boundary. A rectangle around a city inevitably drags in pieces of neighbouring areas, and cleaning them up by hand is painful. So exports can be clipped strictly to an administrative boundary: pick a city or district from the catalog (about 2.9 million admin areas across 179 countries) and every layer is trimmed to the outline, with cut polygons properly closed along the border.
The service: https://osm2cdr.com. All data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL — attribution is embedded in every export. I’d love feedback from the community: what’s missing, and what feels un-OSM-ish?