This Client Server article is republished in its entirety from 2002 for reference purposes.

By Bentley Technical Support Group
14 October 2002

DWG Work Mode

While testing or working in Microstation V8, did you ever come across the term "Work Mode?" Did you wonder what it means and how it is used? In this article, I will describe the features of the DWG Work Mode in MicroStation V8.

MicroStation V8 supports the following workmodes:

• DGN Capacity-In the default DGN Capacity ("DGN") mode, full MicroStation V8 functionality is enabled.
• DWG Restriction-In DWG Restriction ("DWG") mode, certain functionality is disabled by default in order to restrict MicroStation V8 to create only information that can be stored in DWG format.

Figure 1. The blue cross hair icon tells you that you are in DWG mode.

Figure 2. An information box also lets you know you are in DWG mode.

When you open a DWG file, you are automatically in DWG workmode. You can easily find out that you are in DWG mode by checking the blue cross hair icon on the status bar.

If you click on the icon, you get an information box, which tells you that you are in DWG mode.

You will find that while working in DWG Workmode, certain MicroStation functionalities are disabled. This happens so that the file will be compatible with the format and the types of entities, which are supported by AutoCAD.

Here's a listing of some of these restricted features:

Line style
Line styles 1-7 are disabled and only custom line styles are allowed.

References
The active model cannot be self-referenced.

Tags
Tag elements can be attached only to shared cells. Microstation normally allows tags to be attached to any element.

Cells
Only shared cells are allowed. When library cells are used, they are placed as shared cells only. DWG files do not support unshared MicroStation cells.

Colors
The DWG color palette is the only color table loaded; no other color tables can be loaded.

Dimensioning
The following dimensioning settings and capabilities are not supported:

• Custom prefixes and suffixes
• Dimension line level
• Dimensioning at an arbitrary position
• Terminator-specific symbology
• Terminator character symbol
• First and joint terminator types for consecutive dimensions
• Unit formats and free labelling (only x'-x" is allowed when master units are inches)
• Unit separation at thousandth and millionth
• Secondary dimension-specific leading/trailing zeros
• Alternate labelling
• Arc symbol above text displayed at an angle
• Arc-length format for angular dimension
• Cell terminator-specific width and height
• Underline text
• Curve for ball and chain text alignment

Text Fonts
MicroStation fonts from the default font resource file are disabled. You can only use DWG-compatible and TrueType fonts.

Levels

Level Symbology is disabled.

View Groups

Creating, deleting and modifying properties of View Groups are disabled.

Area patterning

AutoCAD pre-defined hatching replaces area patterning. The pattern area settings window's pattern field is a combination box that lists the patterns in the areapat.pat DWG pattern file by default. This file contains DWG pattern definitions for each pattern cell in the supplied cell library, areapat.cel.

View window background color

The Black Background -> White setting in the View Options category of the Preferences dialog box (Workspace > Preferences) is disabled. To change the display for models and layouts of DWG files, select the color in the DWG Open Options dialog box.

See the MicroStation Administrator's Guide for more information and a complete list of restrictions. Also, the online MicroStation V8 Help File contains a wealth of information regarding this topic.

See also

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