"B a r r y" wrote in message
news:H7ZUd.38080
While I truly appreciate your efforts, sheet goods are where cutlists are
truly useful.

What good are cutting diagrams for solid stock when the locations of sap /
heartwood, defects, and figure quality are unknown to the program?


Actually a solid stock cutting diagram is quite handy. I use Cutlist Plus,
a different program that will let you keep an inventory of your on hand
panels, lumber, and materials. While it is true that with Cutlist Plus you
do no have total flexibility over looking at grain on each board it does
however let you take each board that you have and enter an area that should
be considered cut off/ waste from on the perimeter. For instance if you are
buying S2S or S3S boards you can tell the program to automatically not
consider the edges of the boards that need to be straightened with any
measurement you choose for each individually entered or group of boards. In
addition you can tell the program to not consider the first 2 or 3 inches on
each end of a board to compensate for planer snipe or small splits at the
ends of the board.
Then, for me personally I use Cutlist Plus to tell me how much lumber and or
panels to buy for a given project. I simply ender in to the Raw Materials
data base the kind of panels and boards that I will be shopping for and the
program will use those sizes and types that I entered to determine the
quantity that I need to buy. Naturally you do not always get the sizes that
you set out to buy so I edit the Raw Materials list to reflect what I
actually ended up with and run the layouts for optimal cutting results.