DGN Support

TPC supports most, but not all of the DGN drawing objects and conventions. The goal of importing a DGN drawing into TPC is to be able to check and use the drawing objects in a survey. To this end, TPC reads the lines, arcs, polylines, levels, shared cells, etc. and recreates them as TPC drawing objects, levels (layers) and shared cells (blocks) in the current drawing. Now you can work with the drawing as if you had created it in TPC.

Levels Become Layers

TPC recreates the imported DGN levels in the current drawing as layers. If you have the Professional or Premium editions, you can edit the layers using the Layers dialog. Once imported, you can do some neat things with layers that you could never do in CAD, like isolating a single layer to work on, ignoring the layers you aren’t working with, update all the color of all the objects on a layer to BYLAYER and lots more.

Shared Cells Become Blocks

TPC reads the shared cells from the DGN file and recreates them in the current drawing as blocks. The blocks are referenced in your TPC drawing much like they are in CAD with scale, rotation, etc. You can save any of the blocks to TPC’s object library and reuse them again and again.

Non-shared Cells Become Groups

Non-shared cells become groups in TPC. A group is comprised of individual drawing objects which can be edited individually but maintain their position in the group. As a result the group can be repositioned anywhere on the drawing.

Entities

TPC supports the most common DGN entities like lines, arcs, circles, polylines, and text. TPC simply creates the corresponding drawing objects for each of these entity types. Once created, you can edit the TPC objects to change their properties, align them, copy them, etc.

Hatching

TPC writes most of its hatch patterns to DGN files. The exceptions are the fills TPC creates with bitmaps. Some of the bitmap fills in TPC have DGN fills that are similar, but not exactly the same.

What’s Not Supported

TPC doesn’t support everything in a DGN file. Remember, the goal is to be able to use the surveying information in the DGN file, not be a CAD file viewer or another Bentley compatible CAD program.

Adding Support

If you have something in your DGN files that TPC does not support but would help you in your work, please let us know. We will be adding additional DGN support as requested.

Editions

Professional