Saturday, February 25, 2006

Want those ESRI symbols in your AutoCAD MAP

How many times have you wished the point symbols in the ArcGIS were in AutoCAD MAP. Well they can be with a little work. The symbols in ESRI are nothing but fonts so all you need to do is find out what font file they are in. Go into the properties for the point in ArcMAP and it tells you. In AutoCAD create mtext and import that font using the windows MapChar dialog. Now explode the mtext to lines and arcs or plines. Clean it up a little if needed and create a block from the geometry. Now when you import a ESRI shape file into MAP use that block as the point symbol.
Note: The 3D and the bmp, the ones with color, symbols are not fonts so this tip will not work for them.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Explode does not explode the text and mtext. Please elaborate a bit.
Thanks,
MNRaghu

Murph said...

Try the Express Tool "TXTEXP" and make sure there's no custom routine running that keeps people from exploding text on purpose.