Re: DBUG> importing ACAD files

[Mark Wilhelm <markw@grazadovelleco.com>]

Ouch!  Nick, have you never opened a really detailed survey or civil 
engineer's Acad drawing?  I get them a lot on some of my bigger 
projects, and they're stuffed with things like zoning info, 
drainage/runoff tables, elaborate legends, borders and titles for 
numerous plotted sheets (viewports), and all sorts of other junk I'm not 
interested in.  Fortunately, those things are usually on separate 
layers, and can simply be turned off to show only the stuff I'm 
interested in.  Then with some fiddling with colors and lines and text 
fonts and sizes and such and I get a usable base drawing for my 
architectural site plans.  No tracing required.

It would make me absolutely nuts if I got such a drawing with everything 
on one layer.  There's no way I could use that.  I'm not about to try to 
trace all that stuff, and try to sort out the info I need from the junk 
that runs across and through everything.  So, if I got a drawing like 
that there'd be one really nasty phone call and the sender would send me 
the file with all the layers intact. 

As to Dcad's flattening of blocks, that's a real problem if true.  I 
don't think I've experienced it, though maybe it explains some minor 
problems I've had with importing drawings, with some symbol entities 
appearing on the wrong layers - I just thought that was the engineer's 
misuse of layers.  But typically the engineers' drawings I've received 
have been fairly well behaved, if not completely toilet trained.

Another thought about that flat drawing: maybe it wasn't drawn in Acad 
at all, perhaps it was a bad conversion from some other platform.  I had 
problems like that with some drawings an architect I was helping out 
sent me, converted from VectorWorks (ref. some chat last week or so).  
Those drawings had almost everything on one or two layers, and a whole 
lot of empty layers, some of which somehow had the reference points of 
symbols (blocks) on them, only.  Bizarre.

Oh, I do maintain Acad on my machine (a somewhat elderly but serviceable 
version) so I can open DWG files and clean them a bit before trying to 
load them into Dcad.  It's amazing what running their purge function on 
DWGs can do to make them easier to open and use.  Also it's good to see 
what they looked like to their author.

Ernie, call the guy and tell him to send you a good file. 

Mark Wilhelm
Marblehead, MA


>>And yes, Ted, there WERE many layers on this site drawing I imported, almost 
>>400!!  (it was a very large site plan drawing of a very large site, topo, 
>>boundary, utilities, the works)  The main problem was that I couldn't do 
>>much with them since most of the drawing ended up on only ONE layer!  Does 
>>anyone know if this happens during the transfer?  And is there a way to 
>>avoid it?  It certainly would help if I could deal with their layers by 
>>turning off the ones I don't need.  Instead, I had to use the drawing 
>>simply as a base for tracing.
>>    
>>
>
>Yes and no. One problem is with multi-layer symbols (blocks). These come
>into DataCad with all the entities on the layer of insertion. I haven't
>seen this for a while and I thought it had been fixed with Dcad v11.
>Apparently not. It may be fixable by asking the sender to explode the
>blocks, but that may not be worth the effort. It probably doesn't explain
>the 400 layers anyway. That is better explained by the slack-assed
>unprofessionalism prevalent in the AutoCad community. The delete empty
>command in your layer manager is a gift from God, with this in mind.
>
>Another great gift is an XRef as your base for tracing. Import the ACad
>into an AEC, then start an all new drawing and use that as an XRef. This
>keeps your work entirely separate from theirs and each is clearly
>identifiable. It also keeps any poisonous influences where they belong.
                   *******************************
 To Access DataCAD Web Links, Go To: http://world.std.com/~eshu/links.htm
 New Posts-> datacad-dbug@world.std.com OR http://tinyurl.com/4ywef