DWG inches

Question

Hi! 
 I often get an external dwg file with misconfigured units. Some autocad users have the units set in inches and actually use them as if they are meters and it doesn&rsquo;t bother them. When I attach such a dwg Microstation recalculates the units and more attachment does not fall in the right place nor is it the right size. How can I fix a dwg using a microstation so that its dimensions do not change when changing units? For now, we are making this change in ZW CAD, but we only have one ZW CAD license in the company, so it is a hassle for us. 
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Lorys · Answer

download and install free autocad true view ... then you can open dwg and you can find out what the units used are ie truen units or unitless.. keyin units and it should tell you. 
 other advantage is you can use it to save to any version you want .. especially if your version of mstn doesnt handle the active version of DWG used, then True view cna convert it to earlier versions.. and also batch convert in place so files are not renamed just changes versions, also it lets you see what the DWG looks like in a DWG environment.. very useful free tool... I've never tried to use it to change units but if I know what the units actually are it helps when xrefing into mstn so I can scale it to suit or import into mnst at right scale and location relative to real world survey..

Lorys · Answer

not much point scaling if you don't have real points to scale against... 
 I am a metric world drafter in meters so for me its either 1: 1 or 1:1000 when attaching acad ..fortunately I have something to compare with ie an airphoto , or some other survey or I roughly know where its supposed to be so I can turn on Bing even in v8i as I have a bing key and can check if its 1000's of meters away or drawn as if it were mm so I have to scale it 1000 x and very rare occasions 100 x ie centimeters... 
 a lot of acad drafters here in Oz have the annoying habit of taking everything drawn 1:1 real world in meters and grouping it all and scaling down 1000xs to make it mm and move it all down to 0,0 totally destroying any reference to real world coordinates... sometimes you can get lucky and scale it up 1000's and it goes back to realworld coordinates... but not always...

MaryB · Answer

AutoCAD users do get pretty cavalier with their units...I ran into the "we used whatever" problem on a drawing the other day. 
 1 inch is .0254 meter, and so 1 meter is 39.37007874 inches. You *should* be able to use whichever scale factor suits your situation to scale your drawing around xy=0,0,0 to get it into the correct position. 
 You can also turn OFF the "True Scale" setting when attaching the drawing. In theory, that should prevent MicroStation from calculating between units (although sometimes it doesn't always work, so something else may be happening).

DWG inches

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