It’s usually easy enough to draw a coordinate grid on your project in the current coordinate system. But what if you need to draw a latitude longitude or other coordinate system grid. The lines and labels aren’t ortho anymore nor is the spacing the same (or even consistent).
The ESRI Shapefile is a common exchange format with GIS systems and users often receive .SHP files representing contours. However, most of the time the elevation data is not stored on the shapefile geometry, instead it’s a column in the associated .DBF file. This typically leads to multiple steps having to import then do processes to read the attached data to elevate them properly, so why not do it all in one step.
Sometimes things that should be simple turn out to be (at best) difficult to do in CAD engines. For example the need to draw text along linear objects such as lines, arcs, polylines, etc. Long street names are a good example, if there isn’t a long straight segment for a regular (but rotated) text, what’s left to do.
Legends are a standard inclusion on any civil/survey drawing. A table to describe the graphic symbols and even linetypes are needed. The question is when these table are generated and how. Some users wait until the project is nearly complete then manually draw the tables. Revisions may introduce new symbols that can’t be forgotten. There has to be a better way.
Harvests multiple drawing extents and properties (DWGPROPS), creates output drawings or reports. Export to Google Earth (KML) with preview thumbnail or web ready reports (HTM) and more.
This tool transforms coordinates using three known points on two systems using Affine, Helmert or Sixparm transforms. Most users will find the LINES definition method is easiest, as in the example below where we have drawn 3 LINE objects (shown in cyan dashed lines).
Map users often want to insert user blocks into the drawing from files containing latitude and longitude values. This tool does just that, places inserts into the drawing at projected locations from files containing lat/long values.
When you receive a drawing containing survey points from outside sources, many times they are not ready for use in your system. They are many times simple blocks with varying attributes (if you’re lucky) but almost always require some reworking. While there are times when you can use CAD block export to create a CSV file for import, your results will vary and it usually requires jumping through hoops.
A lot of old drawings (and some new ones created by CAD beginners) can contain text objects (along with other geometry) to represent points. The text is often the elevation but it can be the point number or description. Because the position of the text is NOT the desired position, putting the objects together manually (by picking and typing) could easily burn a day’s time that should not be justified as billable time.