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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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In the early days of AutoCAD, users could safely use a NODe osnap to snap to a point block while zoomed out because they knew it would only return the actual intended point of the insert. Then along came an improvement that had AutoCAD return the insertion point of the attributes. With that improvement meant you had constantly zoom in to make sure you were getting the right point.

For those that aren’t aware, the OSNAPNODELEGACY set to 1 causes the CAD engine restore the logical NODe osnap of the point object only. Now in the highly unlikely case you want to snap to attributes, you can use the INSert osnap.