What’s New In ArcGIS 9.2 for CAD: Part 6
Improved Rendering of CAD Features Classes
Hotrods and choppers used to be salvage vehicles built by people who couldn’t afford something new. Now, more new cars and motorcycles are being designed to look more like those customized versions. Ironically, I suspect this is a move by motorcycle and automakers to capture the lower-end market that can’t afford the modern choppers and hotrods we see built on the discovery channel!
Like having the styling of the hotrod and the reliability of power steering and power breaks, people want the benefits of both methods of working with CAD data in ArcMap. They want the feature class access provided by the CAD Feature Class (blue icon) and the default CAD symbology of the CAD Drawing Layer (white icon). Most often people choose the blue icon to add CAD features to the map, and the first thing they do is change the symbology of the CAD feature class to make it look more like the CAD file was drawn in CAD.
In previous versions of ArcGIS, CAD features are treated like other GIS data sources and are assigned a single random symbol for the entire feature class. In ArcGIS 9.2 the initial symbology is based on the CAD symbology. CAD color, line style, font, line weight and other information is used to draw the CAD features like they appear inside the CAD application that created them. With the release of ArcGIS 9.2 the need for the two different methods for working with CAD data is greatly diminished. With ArcGIS 9.2, I can’t think of a good reason to use the CAD Drawing Layer (white icon) anymore.
In ArcGIS 9.2 you can still use the CAD Drawing Layer (white icon) to draw all of the CAD entities with CAD properties as a single layer; however the new default symbology for the CAD feature class is actually better. For example, the white icon doesn’t support true type fonts, standard CAD line styles or line weights. Work has been done to create a CAD symbology set for standard CAD symbology values including line style, line weight and standard CAD color values. In ArcGIS 9.2 the “more useful” CAD feature class representation (blue icons) of the CAD data, also has superior default symbology, as compared with the single CAD Drawing Layer (white icon).
Improved default symbology for CAD text associates true type fonts used in CAD to true type fonts available in ArcMap. Default values for complex CAD text justification are also improved, which means CAD text in ArcMap looks more like it did in CAD.
Hotrods and choppers used to be salvage vehicles built by people who couldn’t afford something new. Now, more new cars and motorcycles are being designed to look more like those customized versions. Ironically, I suspect this is a move by motorcycle and automakers to capture the lower-end market that can’t afford the modern choppers and hotrods we see built on the discovery channel!Like having the styling of the hotrod and the reliability of power steering and power breaks, people want the benefits of both methods of working with CAD data in ArcMap. They want the feature class access provided by the CAD Feature Class (blue icon) and the default CAD symbology of the CAD Drawing Layer (white icon). Most often people choose the blue icon to add CAD features to the map, and the first thing they do is change the symbology of the CAD feature class to make it look more like the CAD file was drawn in CAD.
In previous versions of ArcGIS, CAD features are treated like other GIS data sources and are assigned a single random symbol for the entire feature class. In ArcGIS 9.2 the initial symbology is based on the CAD symbology. CAD color, line style, font, line weight and other information is used to draw the CAD features like they appear inside the CAD application that created them. With the release of ArcGIS 9.2 the need for the two different methods for working with CAD data is greatly diminished. With ArcGIS 9.2, I can’t think of a good reason to use the CAD Drawing Layer (white icon) anymore.
In ArcGIS 9.2 you can still use the CAD Drawing Layer (white icon) to draw all of the CAD entities with CAD properties as a single layer; however the new default symbology for the CAD feature class is actually better. For example, the white icon doesn’t support true type fonts, standard CAD line styles or line weights. Work has been done to create a CAD symbology set for standard CAD symbology values including line style, line weight and standard CAD color values. In ArcGIS 9.2 the “more useful” CAD feature class representation (blue icons) of the CAD data, also has superior default symbology, as compared with the single CAD Drawing Layer (white icon).
Improved default symbology for CAD text associates true type fonts used in CAD to true type fonts available in ArcMap. Default values for complex CAD text justification are also improved, which means CAD text in ArcMap looks more like it did in CAD.
posted by Don Kuehne at 11:44 AM
4 Comments:
Hi Don,
Nice series of articles. I was wondering if it is possible to bring in multiple CAD files into ArcMAP and have all the line features from all CAD files go into a single line FeatureClass and similarly for the rest of the feature types?
-Vish
Vish,
Thanks for the compliment. You could organize the collection of Polyline features classes together as a group layer. However, what I think you're really asking is can you have them usable as a single feature class. The ArcGIS Data Interoperability extension has the ability to take information from several CAD files and treat them as a single feature layer in-memory without conversion.
Without the ArcGIS Data Interoperability extenstion you would have to use a tool like MERGE to make a new ArcGIS Feature Class out of all the different CAD polyline feature classes. If you think about it, this could be a temporary conversion you perform each time you look at the files, in which case whether it is in-memory or on disk doesn't really matter to you. At that point it is just the extra step that you could automate in a GP Model.
Hi Don,
thanks for the valuable information,
my question is that can we show and edit the object data as a text in autocad.
i have a shp with some attibute .i imported into Cad and want to dispaly their object data as text and edit them .
and again exported into the shp.
is it possible. if yes then how?
Currently there is not a method of editing attributes as visible labels in ArcGIS for AutoCAD, but if the objects are points you still have the option to include those attributes as block attributes. See some of my other posts on using blocks. That said, you are inferring that you are using .shp files which is really not needed when using ArcGIS for AutoCAD because all of the feature class information can be exchanged between ArcGIS desktop and ArcGIS for AutoCAD without Shapefiles. The .DWG can contain the attributed feature classes without a need to convert back and forth.
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