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CAD cogo point and symbol displays
Alright, I admit, I’m not Gawd’s gift to drafting. I switched over to Carlson w/ Intellicad about two years ago and before that I was using antiquated Foresight, which we took as far and long as we could before we had to ditch it. It’s been a learning curve and I’ve made good progress but the one thing that has been evading me is getting all the settings figured out. What I could use some guidance on understanding is how to get cogo points and symbols to display so that they aren’t microdots or monoliths. Finding that sweet spot. I’ve played around with setting the drawing up at different scales, symbol and test plot size, line type scalar, Resize Point Attributes. I’ll think I have it figured out, save and close out the drawing, open it up again and cogo points and symbols have reverted back to some unacceptable scale. Some days feel like a monkey humping a football, but eventually I’ll get this all dialed in and I’m not too proud to ask for a little help.
I’m in the process of taking 20 years of old Foresight drawings, cleaning up the coordinate files and organizing all of coordinates into control files to make life simpler, some day. Most of these control files will cover on the order of 9 sections and contain thousands of points. When we get a new survey, all the data is in one place to look to see what we have in the area for control or comps to get going. Right now everything is scattered in hundred, no, thousands of old Foresight drawings that at some point I won’t be able to open.
If I can walk away with one nugget of knowledge from this crowd I’ll be that much farther ahead.
Cheers.
Rooting for HC.
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7 Replies
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I am in no way a skilled drafter, when I am working in Carlson, or even A CAD I know enough to be dangerous. I create my layer names and import my text files in my default Carlson point symbol preference and then do my calcs to hand it off to drafting to produce a drawing that complies with our established drafting standards.
Your biggest obstacle, as I understand it, seems to be exporting points from past jobs on an aged out platform to create a mosaic of control from past projects in the area that your newer ones are in. If I am correct, that will be labor intensive as you will have to export all of your txt/csv files to import them into Carlson if they do not support the older format import.
Once you work around that format, you can set up a field to finish file in Carlson with your preferred point symbols based on your field coding. As far as the scaling, that’s over my head but it seems to me that it will be a labor intensive effort switching from a non supported old format.
Somebody with real drafting experience might correct me if I am wrong but I have been a Carlson user since 2005 and can tell you that their tech support is very helpful and they have great tutorial videos on their web site.
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It’s tedious for sure but not overly complicating getting coordinates out as a text file and opening and sorting, stripping out extraneous points in excel and then combining and renumbering them. The real pressure is organizing the data in Carlson in Point Groups, locking the stuff down and getting it as close to right on the first pass so that it’s all stable. The Field to Finish coding is the next hurdle. As it stands the vast majority of our work is in this G&$@!n Foresight that I inherited and the subsequent years of tight budgets where I was always asked to ‘do more with less’ with result being a deep hole being dug with me at the bottom looking up at the sky. Basically I want to take 25 years worth of this work scattered in myriad different Foresight jobs and get any data that would provide a leg up on tomorrow’s job, in one location. One stop shopping.
I’ve already talked with Carlson support but I don’t think I got the right guy on the right day. Thought I’d just throw it out here and see where it goes.
Willy -
“I’ll think I have it figured out, save and close out the drawing, open
it up again and cogo points and symbols have reverted back to some
unacceptable scale.”Is your Point Defaults set to Use Annotative Points? Do you have Annotative Blocks defined in your drawing? That could be why these objects keep jumping around to be different scales than what you last set them for.
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Affirmative on the use of Annotative Points but I am using the standard Carlson symbols and I’m a little unclear if there is anything I need to do to further define them as Annotative Blocks. As with any problem figuring out the right questions to ask is half the battle. Thanks and I will look at this further and talk with Carlson support to get some clarification on what I’m doing wrong.
Willy -
For what it’s worth, I’ve been using AutoCAD, then IntelliCAD for a while, now back on AutoCAD since before Y2K. I’ve only looked briefly at Annotative Blocks, never really made an effort to understand how to use them. IntelliCAD drawing files are composed of basic AutoCAD objects, pre-Civil3D. Carlson Points are just AutoCAD blocks composed of a Point Object, A Symbol, and Attributes (the text). My system is set to use no symbol as part of my point block, but it will insert the symbol as a separate object when using Field To Finish. I do not use Annotative point blocks. They stay the same size no matter what changes I make to the drawing scale.
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Not sure if this really addresses your question properly, but it might be something towards the path to finding an answer: https://files.carlsonsw.com/mirror/manuals/Carlson_2022/source/General/Settings/PointLabelSettings/pointlabel.html
This setting lets you select a general size you want points to display at, but it is not a fixed size, it adjusts with the zoom level.
Sad to say, but this is something I’ve only just recently found out about after well over 20 years of using Carlson.
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This reply was modified 8 months, 1 week ago by Jon Payne.
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This reply was modified 8 months, 1 week ago by
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Cool. New one on me. I will play around with that. Thanks.
Willy
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