Plywood Cut List Optimizer

How the layout is worked out

• The blade has a width, and it is subtracted. Two 500 mm parts do not come out of a 1000 mm sheet if the saw eats 3 mm between them. Every part is padded by one kerf on its far side and the sheet by one kerf overall. Set the kerf to your actual blade: a full-kerf table saw blade is about 3.2 mm (1/8″), a thin-kerf one 2.4 mm (3/32″), a track saw around 2.2 mm, and a CNC router whatever the cutter is.
• Table-saw mode only makes cuts that go all the way across. That is the only cut a saw with a fence can make, so the layout is built as a tree of guillotine cuts. The cut sequence under each sheet lists them parents-first: follow it top to bottom and every cut is one you can physically make on the piece in front of you.
• CNC mode packs tighter and is not cuttable on a saw. It drops parts wherever they fit, which is fine for a router or a jigsaw and impossible with a fence. The sheet count is usually the same or one better.
• Grain is respected. A part set to run with the grain is never turned sideways, usually the right call on anything with a face veneer. Set a material's grain to "none" for MDF and the optimiser gets both orientations back.
• Hundreds of layouts are tried and the best one kept. Optimal bin packing is NP-hard, so this is a deterministic search across sort orders, fitting rules, split policies, and orientation policies. The same cut list always gives the same answer.
• It fills boards rather than spreading the shortfall. Four sheets at 95/95/95/40% beat four at 81% each: the first leaves three clean boards and one big remnant, the second leaves four boards each half-wrecked.

What the offcuts are worth

• Every sheet you buy ends up as three things, and the summary prices all three: the parts, the offcuts big enough to keep, and what the blade ate.
• "Worth keeping" is your call. An offcut counts if both sides are at least the size you set, 150 mm by default, about six inches. Keepable offcuts are outlined in green on the drawings and listed with sizes and positions in the export.
• The value is the plywood's own price, pro rata. An offcut a tenth of a sheet in area counts as a tenth of what the sheet cost, a ceiling on what is recoverable. Leave the price at zero and the same split is shown as areas.

The export

• The .xlsx is a real workbook, generated in your browser with no spreadsheet library. Numbers land as numbers, so the cut list sorts, filters, and sums the moment it opens in Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice, or Numbers.
• Five tabs: the bill of materials, the parts, one row per sheet with its yield, every piece's position measured from the sheet's bottom-left corner, and the cut sequence with fence settings.
• "Copy for Google Sheets" puts the cut list on the clipboard as tab-separated text. Printing gives the shop copy: layouts and cut sequences only.

What it will not do

• It does not know about defects, or which way the good face points. Yields assume the whole sheet is usable.
• It does not add anything for edge banding or rabbets. Sizes in are sizes out. Add your own allowance if you want one.
• The last sheet is a whole sheet. The bill of materials rounds up, because the yard does not sell two-thirds of a sheet.

Everything (the nesting and the spreadsheet writer) runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, and your work is kept in this browser's local storage so it survives a reload.

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