scaling or replacing SS4 Lines and line strings in ORD

There can be a number of factors at play.

Does your SS4 drawing and your ORD drawing have the same Working unit definitions? That can cause issues with scaling.
Are these regular cells or annotative cells?
Is your annotation scale the same in each drawing, and are the annotation scales defined the same way?
Is your Model Global Linestyle Scale set to match your annotation scale, or is it set to a separate factor?

You can look at the Help file to find where most of these settings are.
If you can find and compare those settings between your SS4 drawing and your ORD drawing, we can probably help you figure out where the scaling factors are playing from.

Hi MaryB.  Both drawings have the same working units.  They are all annotative cells.  It appears the state has changed the size of the raw cells in the library which caused the need to replace all the cells manually.  I think the cells are repaired.  I'm not sure where any global annotation scale is set?  My drawing scale I have set to 1"=40'.  Each cell is inserted (replaced) at a scale of 1, such that the drawing scale controls the size.  The lines and line strings however are a mixed bag of sizes.  If I draw a line, it is a much different size than what came from SS4, yet if I examine the properties of each, they are the same (except the coordinates and length).  I have searched the help for combinations of Global Linestyle scale and find nothing.  I knew how to access a model properties in SS4, but cannot find this in ORD?  Is there a global annotation scale somewhere also?  Not in the help either.

I'm just clicking File - Help - Help Contents.  Not sure where else to search.  Bentley Support typically ignores my requests for support or they can't address the question, thus this forum seems to be the last resort.

The Models dialog is very similar to the one in SS4, and has all of the same Model properties (including Global Linestyle Scale and Annotation Scale).

Resources may indeed be different between SS4 and ORD. I know my state DOT is still developing their workspace, rewriting quite a few of their files.

Working units may be the same, but you will need to compare units of resolution as well. It is possible to have two drawings that both use "Survey Feet" but one is defined as 10,000 UOR per SF, while the other is set up to 7620 UOR per SF. Those two drawings will not reference into each other at the proper scale without a bit of understanding what might be going on. that will be in the Design File Settings.

At the top right of the application, there is a search bar, and you can type in commands and phrases to find them. You can access the models dialog and the design files settings that way if you can't find them any other way. Yes, the ribbon is clunky and nothing is easy to find...

Hi Mary.  I found the "Models" through the ribbon.  Still not sure how else one accesses this.  The working units are the same.  I made a screen capture of the model properties.  I've looked it over, but am not sure what could be wrong.  Does something appear to be wrong?  This is their Seed drawing.  First time I've found this in ORD.

Sorry this is so small.  Lucky I got it here.  

Hi Mary.  I found the "Models" through the ribbon.  Still not sure how else one accesses this.  The working units are the same.  I made a screen capture of the model properties.  I've looked it over, but am not sure what could be wrong.  Does something appear to be wrong?  This is their Seed drawing.  First time I've found this in ORD.

Sorry this is so small.  Lucky I got it here.  

So it looks like the linestyle scale is set to the annotation scale which I'm toggling between 1 to 1 and 1"=40'.  Indeed some of the lines and line strings do change.  But how can I work through the drawing like I did with the cells to change these to be correct?  This is an interstate project with miles of Topo coming from an Aerial LiDAR survey.  I'm just trying to correct the lines and line strings at this point.  Cells look ok, but I have no example to look at in ORD.  I'm sure struggling with ORD, and SS4 was bad enough.  I've only been using Microstation/Inroads since 2002, so I'm a novice.  I can leave AutoCAD for months, open it up, and have no problems figuring out how to make things work.  It's so frustrating.

Here is a small piece of the disaster.  The huge text are "Notes" with a leader.  These looked good in SS4.  I can't seem to scale these back either.  When I look at the scale of a cell at 1"=40' it claims the scale is 480 (x,y,z).  Why would the scale not be 40?  I can imagine 40x12inches... but this is a US Survey Foot drawing.  Lines and line strings are showing a scale of 1.000.  At 1"=40' you can barely see the text along the lines.

Annotation scale was not originally part of MicroStation and not even in the earliest releases of V8. At many DOT's, when a feature like this gets added to MicroStation, too many projects are in the pipeline to adopt the new features. And we often do not have the resources to maintain multiple workspace standards within a large, multi-discipline agency to allow a gradual migration of new features. I've been struggling for three years to roll out an Ss4 standard that is a break from our Ss2 and earlier standard to finally enable a number of "new" features - at least to our staff, our consultants and projects.

We found, if you

1. select all linestrings, shapes, complex lines and shapes, arcs using the Element Selector and the element type tab
2. switch to the line style tab and deselect any linestyles 0-7
3. use the element info properties dialog box to change the line style scale factors to 1.0

This should fix those elements. Text is much trickier as some tools by default placed text using annotation scale and others do not. You need to isolate them and sometimes need to unscale them before applying annotation scale. Even than, text offsets from their intended location do not always scale correctly. If you look, all annotation by Open Roads create annotation cells. This allows a cell origin to define an anchor and scale about point that is not tied to any of the graphic elements that make up the annotation. This an only be done with text if you add spaces and empty lines of text to make the text origin appear to be some distance from the text and when scales, the offsets scale with the text.

We have some tools in our workspace (VBA) that try to adjust line styles when the line styles are being scaled by annotation scale and might have tools for text, but I'd have to check.   

That is their seed drawing. What about your drawing? What are your model properties for the model you are struggling with?

CaddCop is right - DOT's often end up with a mishmash of standards, developed at different times for different needs, without a lot of auditing or editing.

It sounds as if your DOT is using the scale factors the same way mine does, using a factor of 12 so that 1" = 40' is a scale factor of 480. This actually is correct because 40' is made up of 480". Yes, it's confusing and annoying, possibly not the most intuitive, but it IS correct by that logic.

I see the unit resolution in the ORD Seed File is 12000 per Survey Foot. Is that identical to your SS4 Seed File? If not, that could be part of the problem.

You also have the option to change your linestyle scale in the models dialog to a fixed factor different from your annotation scale if you choose. You can also change linestyle scales on a ByLevel basis on the Styles tab of the Level Properties dialog (accessed by right-clicking the level name in Level Manager).

Fixing Note elements is going to be hard because those NEVER behave in either version of the software.

You can scale text "about Element Center" (which as I recall is actually the justfication point). Try scaling by 0.08333 (which is 1/12) and see what difference that makes.

Things show differently in ORD because the workspace in ORD is different. ORD is not using your SS4 workspace - the support files are not the same. One more reason that things need to be kept in one or the other.

I have tried many things.  My Model is set to 1"=40'.  It claims therefore my Design scale is 480.

I have "Propagate Annotation Scale" = ON.  It seems when I toggled "Update fields Automatically, this seemed to change

linestyles.  At 1"=40' the text along the lines is unreadable.  But this could be the DOT not having them built correctly?

Not sure how I can check that.

I have another problem.  I created a cell with a circle and the word "MISC" for points that are miscellaneous code.

it is set to annotation, and scales, but now I want to edit the text.  The text is called a "TAG"  and I cannot figure out how to edit the TAG?  I used to drop the text, but then it doesn't act like a cell and has no annotation.  Are TAG's somehow editable?  I made the cell in SS2, SS3, or SS4, I can't recall.