How to convert STEP
to X_T?

STEP or "Standard for the Exchange of Product model data" is also referred as ISO 10303. STEP has been initially designed with the idea to supersede the IGES format (which was the first broadly used vendor-neutral CAD file format). However even today both formats co-exist and data in IGES and STEP represent lion share of all CAD files.

Typically, STEP can be used to exchange data between CAD, CAM, CAE, PDM/enterprise data modeling and other CAx systems. STEP addresses product data from mechanical and electrical design, geometric dimensioning and tolerancing, analysis and manufacturing, as well as additional information specific to various industries such as automotive, aerospace, building construction, ship, oil and gas, process plants and others.

STEP is developed and maintained by the ISO technical committee. There are also various technical groups that define usage conventions and recommended practices to ensure better interoperability between software applications. In CAD world, the most prominent group is www.cax-if.org that unites software vendors and industrial users.

ISO10303 is very extremely large and complex and is structured in multiple layers, for example, from physical file format definition (Part 21) to geometrical/topological definitions (Part 42), up to Application Protocols (AP’s) defining higher-level industry use cases. CAD Exchanger supports AP203, A214 and AP242, which are most commonly used AP's.

A file with extension X_T (Parasolid text files) is used by the Parasolid core created by Siemens PLM Software. It is being developed as a standard export format for distributing Parasolid CAD models.

The X_T file is a set of structured data containing information about the features of the model construction, the topology of its structural elements, color scheme, coordinates of drawing primitives, etc.

The X_T extension is unpretentious to adapt and can be exported / imported for use in a wide variety of CAD systems. It is stored in text format and can be exported and imported using a variety of other computer-aided design programs.

X_T files are used instead of the old version of the XMT_TXT and XMP_TXT files, which are less used than X_B (Parasolid binary files), and store the same data, but in binary format.