I'm experiencing some issues with the coordinate system in my DGN file where the coordinates in the file itself don't match the coordinates of the chosen system.
I'm doing work in Hernando County, FL, and for this job, the coordinate system needs to be NAD83 Florida State Plane West, EPSG:2237 with the units in US Survey Feet. I've set my DGN's coordinate system to that one, and I've verified that my working units are in US Survey Feet.
I've attached a WMS by way of an xwms file that shows the county, and then I've also attached a number of shapefiles which all use WGS84 (EPSG:4326) with units in degrees. When I reproject the shapefiles, they line up perfectly with the WMS background. However, the coordinates of the DGN file do not match those which come from the files.
For example, one particular point from the shapefile is located at 28.500596726°, -82.247924429°, which should reproject to Northing=1514789.17067016, Easting=576536.581210096 (I've verified this using two different coordinate conversion tools as well as checking the output in Google Earth and on the EPSG's web map). However, it is actually located at X=175728.7014, Y=461708.6624 in the drawing. That puts the point in the Gulf, about 22 miles East-Northeast of the Dry Tortugas, under a hundred feet of water.
This is a problem, because I need to call out the Northing/Easting on multiple points, as well as at the intersection of lines from a polyline shapefile.
So my question is twofold: why don't my DGN coordinates match my coordinate system, and what can I do to correct it?
Well, I was going to attach a couple files showing the problem, but only the .prj and DGN files will attach. Both are useless without the rest of the files, so apologies for not being able to share.
I don't know anything about US survey feet or US coordinate systems but the website I looked at gave these Northing and Easting values:
E:377867.37
N:3153292.81
Not sure what website that was, but in EPSG:2237, those coordinates are well outside the bounds of the state plane, somewhere West-Northwest of Sandersville, GA US.
Those values relate to UTM 17R iirc.
Anyway I believe I may have found the problem, your reprojected coordinates you believe to be wrong are I think are actually correct yet the values appear to be metric according to this.
If you listen closely, you can hear me smacking my forehead right now as far away as Central Asia. I literally never checked what the state plane coords would be in meters (that's EPSG:26959.
But I did check my units. I've uploaded a screenshot showing my units, my point and the Element Information window with the coords.
So for some reason, even though I'm set to work in feet, I'm actually working in meters. At least that narrows down the problem, though it doesn't solve it.
/resized-image/__size/1269x606/__key/communityserver-discussions-components-files/273/workingunits.PNG
Not sure if it will help but it might be worth checking out this document:
U.S. Coordinate Systems in MicroStation V8i and Bentley Map V8i
Heh, I've had that document open for a while now. Haven't found any answers in it. I really appreciate the effort, though.
I'm about to get some sleep but if you are still not having any success, feel free to upload a zip file or paste a dropbox link if you want to share the files you are trying work with and I could take a look in the morning.