TPC supports most, but not all of the DWG drawing objects and conventions. The goal of importing a DWG drawing is to be able to check and use the drawing objects in a survey. To this end, TPC reads the lines, arcs, polylines, layers, blocks, etc. and recreates them as TPC drawing objects, layers and blocks in the current drawing. Now you can work with the drawing as if you had created it in TPC.
TPC recreates the imported DWG layers in the current drawing. If you have the Professional edition, 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.
TPC reads the blocks from the DWG file and recreates them in the current drawing. 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.
TPC supports the most common DWG entities like lines, arcs, circles, polylines, light weight polylines, text and mtext. 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.
The text box object is supported by AutoCAD R13 and above.
All light weight polylines imported from a DWG file are assumed to be closed.
TPC writes most of its hatch patterns to DWG files. The exceptions are the fills TPC creates with bitmaps. Some of the bitmap fills in TPC have DWG fills that are similar, but not exactly the same.
Beginning with V8.5, TPC can read entity attributes when importing an AutoCAD DWG or DXF file. Each entity attribute creates a unique text object in the drawing. The text objects inherit their properties (location, color, layer, size, etc) from the attribute definition in the DWG file.
TPC doesn’t support everything in a DWG file. Remember, the goal is to be able to use the information in the DWG file, not be a CAD file viewer or another AutoCAD compatible CAD program. As such, TPC does not support the following: SHAPE, TRACE, 3DFACE, DIMENSION, VIEWPORT, ELLIPSE, SPLINE, RAY, XLINE, LEADER, TOLERANCE, MLINE, IMAGE, 3DSOLID, REGION, BODY.
TPC does not support PAPERSPACE objects, but converts everything to MODELSPACE when writing a DWG file.
If you have something in your DWG files that TPC does not support but would help you in your work, please let us know. We will be adding additional DWG support as requested.
Exporting DWF Files
Importing DWF Drawings
Layers
Working with Drawing Objects
Converting Drawing Objects to Survey Points
Personal, Premium, Professional