By L. Michael Siers

AutoCAD to MicroStation Translation

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Hints: As most of you already know, whenever you exchange drawings with another company it is common practice to send along a drawing list. This is especially important when you send your drawings to a MicroStation office. Your drawing lists should include information such as sheet name and number for your sheet files and description for your xref files. To be even more helpful, you can send them a list that cross references the Xrefs to each sheet file.

Text Fonts to Text Styles
Both AutoCAD and MicroStation have propriety font definitions and both can utilize TrueType fonts. AutoCAD has more options for stylizing fonts such as width factors and oblique angles.

Hint: Even though MicroStation can import text styles that are not apart of its basic font package, you should utilize only the basic AutoCAD fonts such as romans and romand. Do not define strange width factors or oblique angles in your text style definitions and do not utilized control characters such as %%u. Most basic AutoCAD fonts as well as true type fonts can be easily mapped to a comparable text style in MicroStation.

Dimensions to Dimensions
Dimension elements in both AutoCAD and MicroStation can be very complex. AutoCAD dimensions contain a mix of lines, text, polylines, and even blocks. Both cad programs allow you to stylize the dimension in various ways. Both programs also have the capability to create associative dimensions. Associative dimensions incorporate an intelligence into the dimension so that for instance, if the dimension is stretched, the text value will change automatically. For the most part, AutoCAD dimensions will translate into MicroStation properly with a few exceptions.

Hint: Inform the company whether your drawings contain dimensions and also indicate whether those dimensions are associative. During the translation, the company will have the option of converting the dimensions into cells or dimensions. The appearance of the dimension should approximate the AutoCAD drawing but the company may choose to manually dimension the drawings themselves in order to have more control during drawing development after the initial file translation.

The Translation Process
Although you may not be involved in the translation process yourself, you may be interested in knowing what the MicroStation office will be doing once they get your drawings. There are actually two ways to convert an AutoCAD drawing into MicroStation. As some of you who use MicroStation already know, a native DWG file can be opened directly within MicroStation simply by selecting File->Open. In these cases, the translations are performed "on-the-fly" by the built-in MicroStation translator using default settings. The second way to translate an AutoCAD file is by selecting File->Import DWG/DXF within MicroStation. Translating a file in this manner allows you to provide more specific instructions to the built-in MicroStation translator.

Since an intimate knowledge of translation procedures is not well understood by every office, many MicroStation offices will just use the first method to translate your AutoCAD drawings while other offices may be more meticulous. In either case, you can help them tremendously in their translations by utilizing some of the hints that I provided. Finally, before you send your drawings perform a couple of purges to clear out any unused blocks, text styles, and the like. Even better, wblock the entire contents of the drawing to file. This works similar to the purge command but seems to be more effective in eliminating unused layers. One final step you could perform is to audit or recover each of the drawings to repair any possible internal file definition errors that may be present within your drawing.

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