LEparagliding Studio is a free, cross-platform design tool for paragliders — a modern Qt / Open CASCADE port of Pere Casellas' LEparagliding 3.28. Draw your wing with live curve editors, preview the exact 3D shape (NURBS/STEP, DXF, STL), analyse airfoils with the built-in XFLR5, test the design in the Playground's soft-body wind tunnel, and nest its flat parts in the Print/Cut tab. 0.4.1 finishes that last step: the nested layout now leaves the screen as a file you can print or cut.
What's new in 0.4.1
0.4.0 shipped the Print/Cut tab with the parts, the nesting and the live packing — and said tiling to PDF was the next step. This is that step.
Print: tiled PDF at true size
Export PDF… writes one page per sheet, drawn at 1:1, ready to print and tape together.
- Registration crosses on a 100 mm grid, each labelled with its coordinate on the canvas. Neighbouring sheets share the same crosses in their overlap band, so sheets are aligned by laying one over the other until the marks coincide — not by butting edges and hoping.
- Overlap guides mark which strip is repeated from the previous sheet and which sheet covers it next, so it is unambiguous what goes on top of what.
- A 100 mm measuring bar on every sheet. Print dialogs scale to fit by default, and a pattern printed at 97% looks entirely plausible until the wing is sewn. Put a ruler on the bar; if it reads short, the printer scaled the page.
- A header on every sheet naming the wing, the sheet's place in the grid, and the scale it was drawn at.
- Empty sheets are skipped. A nested canvas routinely leaves a corner bare, and that corner is not worth a sheet of paper.
Cut lines, stitch lines and marks are separated by weight and dash pattern as well as colour, so the sheets stay readable on a monochrome laser.
Cut: layered DXF for a plotter or cutting table
Export DXF… writes the nested layout as DXF R12 — the dialect plotters and cutting tables actually accept — with the geometry split across layers so the operator can drive the blade from CUT alone and keep SEAM, MARK and TEXT as reference.
In machine-bed mode each bed load becomes its own file in that load's own coordinates, with the bed outlined on its own layer.
Choose what goes on the sheet
Three switches: stitch lines, marks and part numbers, and the sheet furniture (border, registration marks, ruler and header). Turn everything off and you get cut outlines and nothing else.
Pack and both export buttons now sit pinned below the options rather than at the bottom of the scrolling sidebar, so the thing the tab is for is always in view.
Part numbers now land on the part
Worth calling out, because it would have been discovered with scissors in hand. The original core anchors each part's number where it sits in the plan's drawing box — every rib's number is placed 635 mm to the left of the rib it names. That is fine on the original plan and meaningless once the parts are nested, where the number would have printed on top of whichever unrelated part happened to be packed in that spot. Numbers are now re-anchored onto the part they name.
The same release fixes a bed-mode export that could write a part into two adjacent bed loads — which a machine would have cut twice.
Known limitation, stated plainly
The nester positions each part by a single traced outline, and on some designs a few parts carry cut geometry that outline does not quite cover — a handful of millimetres reaching past the packed sheets, which the export would clip away. Rather than let that happen silently, the tab now says so after packing: "N part(s) have cut geometry reaching past the sheets." On the reference gnuA7/24 wing it is four parts out of 103, by 2 to 8 mm. Check those parts against the plan before cutting them. The proper fix changes how every design packs, so it is queued rather than rushed.
Unchanged from 0.4.0: the original core records no fabric grain, so the exported orientation of a part says nothing about which way the weave should run. Quarter-turn packing reliably avoids the bias; it cannot tell you a part was laid out the way the designer intended.
Install
| Platform | How |
|---|---|
| Windows | Download LEparagliding_v0.4.1_winx64.zip, unzip anywhere, run LEparagliding.exe. Everything is bundled — no installer, no Qt to install. |
| Linux | Download LEparagliding_v0.4.1_linux-x86_64.AppImage, then chmod +x it and run it. |
| macOS | Download LEparagliding_v0.4.1_macos-universal.dmg, open it and drag the app to Applications. The build is unsigned, so the first launch needs right-click → Open rather than a double-click. |