I have several comments on this thread.
First off, Captain Dent, International feet are in fact used on this side of the pond. Oregon for example is an international foot state. There have been numerous threads on the subject and if I recall it is about a 50/50 split between IFt and USft states.
Second, I think we are confusing scaling and units. Drawings should be done at 1:1 in model space no mater what the units. Use paper space for you sheet layout. Then specify the scale when plotting. You can use different viewports to show details at different scales without scaling the original. If you are not using annotative text and symbols you may need to have duplicate information for the final scales you will be using. I just finished up a re-plat of a parcel we plated several years ago. At the time, before economic crisis, I had a friend working for me and this was his project. He is a great surveyor and was one of my mentors as a young LS but CAD is not is strong suite. Anyway, the three sheet of the plat were in model space. The main drawing was at 1:1 but the numerous details were copied, moved and scaled. Talk about a nightmare when I had to change things around. Just remember, paper space is your friend.
Units are another story and unfortunately, AutoCAD is clueless when it comes to units and as a result you can not easily convert between feet (US or Int) and meters or inches without scaling. I'm not sure if this is the case with Carlson and it is the case with Microstation. I find this most irritating since all of my survey programs can do this with the push of a button. You would think that all you really need to do is specify the units you start with and AutoCAD could do the simple math. Long gone are the days of requiring a separate math co-processor to achieve double digit precision.
This brings me to my current crisis. I'm finishing up a project where we laid out about 52 miles of fence to protect endangered desert tortoise that may find themselves crossing busy I-40. Since we work across the western US, I like to collect our field data in meters to eliminate any confusion with USft or IntFt. When this project started, we were just hired to survey in the existing control features and then lay the fence based on their relationship the plans based literally on Google Earth. I just did my internal CAD work in meters to keep it simple. Know the client has contracted us to prepare as-built drawings. These will need to be in US Feet. While I can easily scale the metric drawings, I can not for the life of me remember how to convert the point database in LDD 2009. Any help would be grateful.
John, I like your point on Autocad not easily converting feet to meters. The other program I use at work (pronest, converts drawings to machine language for burning) automatically picks up on the units (inches or mm in my case) and just does it's thing when I input the drawing. Yes, I found that out by happy accident one day.
So, it has been indicated to me that not even a push of a button should be needed when a program can magically detect what the units are and mind read (wow, that's hard to mind read me) what I want......
Scaling points... spreadsheets work.
Or scale the drawing and export points would work too.
Gotta love MicroStation for switching between units. I currently have several NYSDOT and NYCDOT construction projects in meters. With MS it is just one pull down to switch to UsFt. I have created highway acquisition maps (eminent domain) for NYSDOT labeled in both UsFt and meters.
Units are units, but mix them up and scale them only if you really want to create a cluster flux. :woot:
Just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get me.
cptdent, post: 366767, member: 527 wrote: BUT in surveying you must "scale" your plats. Otherwise all the blocks are going to look really tiny, unusable and silly. In steel drawings an d circuit work., it all should be done at 1:1 (1 unit= 1 unit, whatever your units may be.)
International feet? Not this side of the pond. Use them if you want to, but I guarantee that you will end up in court.
The main message I've gotten from this thread is that there are a lot of people out there that have NO concept of the idea of "scale". If you haven't has a basic drafting course, step AWAY from the computer. AND if you've had a basic course and they taught you to never scale a drawing, go back to them and tell them you want your money back. You've been played.
I have no idea what they are talking about on this thread, of course drawings are scaled, never had an issue with that,,,,,,,,,,,,
I have had an issue with people getting my drawings done in a coordinate system, stripping the data, rotating them, putting them at 0,0 to "fit" into their border then sending them back to me to stake.
But scaling?????