Two suggestions come to mind.

Firstly, the "old" way would be to make direct contact with a clothing manufacturer who cuts their own cloth. They had optimising programs as far back as 1980 that should handle your files easily. (These included the direction of the weave pattern for the cloth.)

Second is to contact someone with "water jet" or some form of cutting or welding equipment. Their new software would also have optimising options and even if they didn't cut the parts for you could mark the outlines on their cutting tables.

Thank you JaE, I appreciate the advice. I will look into it.

Hello m!a,

I searched for:

"Flat sheet cutting with Corel DRAW .cdr or AutoCAD .dwg drawing program".

http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A1f4cfal1GNJFxcA3ERLBQx.?p=flat+sheet+cutting+with+Corel+DRAW+.cdr+or+AutoCAD+.dwg+drawing+program&y=Search&fr=yfp-t-501&ei=UTF-8&rd=r1

Please take a look at the search page and let me know if this is the kind of thing you want.

I realise there is some sites for cutting machines which you have. But these sites may also have the programs you ask about.

Good luck and have a great new year!............

we have 1/8" aluminum cut by a contractor. apparently he uses this software for nesting. (I'm also told that it works best if your cad files lines are converted to polyline for this software.)

http://www.cadlink.com/products/signLab/

I looked at various free nesting programmes a while ago for a similar application although I never got round to trying any of them. Here are a couple that I remember.

Sheet Optimiser.

Astra.

There are a lot of programmes that will only handle rectangular shapes & a number of very expensive programmes that do this.