. They are kept in this format to protect intellectual property or to ensure they remain as closed surfaces compatible with the Exocad attachment library importing an STL back into Exocad as a custom attachment?

There is a human economy in that motion. To move from S to T is to accept constraints; to accept that constraints allow work to be shared, edited, reproduced. In a world drowning in ephemeral scrawl, converting s d f a into s t l is a bargaining with permanence. The joke, the flinch, the careless flourish—those are valuable because they live before the translation. Once translated, they are useful, reified, sent into production pipelines who will not know the laughter that birthed them.

: The file size will balloon (over 50MB) without adding printable detail, which can crash your slicer. How to convert an SDFA file to STL? - Facebook

: Be aware that lowering resolution values during export can produce more accurate models but will result in significantly larger file sizes.

Given an automaton over a finite alphabet of atomic propositions (events), produce an STL formula over predicates on a real-valued signal x(t) (or a vector of signals) whose Boolean evaluation matches the automaton language.