AutoCAD to Archicad

[Anonymous]

I've been searching for the answer and haven't come upon anything that works for our application yet, so hopefully everyone here has some great ideas that I can try.

Our engineers provide us with 2d AutoCAD details, so we usually import them into ArchiCAD so we can adjust heights etc if necessary. We have a details worksheet where we keep all our 2d. Typically we've been opening our worksheet and then drag and drop the DWG file onto the screen so we can then explode into the current view to further edit. However, when we do this you can see in the attached photo the text become very small and goes all over the place so we need to re-seize and relocate. We're tired of doing this work around because it takes so much time but cannot find any other way to keep everything together as it shows in AutoCAD. Help please and thank you!

[Eduardo Rolon]

The trick here is simple but it exist because Autocad handles Text in a weird way which is that all fonts are Model Based.

Procedure:

1. Place DWG and Explode
2. Select Text tool and use CMD+A to select all Text
3. Change Text from "Paper Size" to "Model Size"
4. Change the scale of the drawing. The text will resize with the change in scale
5. Select the Text again and switch it back to Paper Size.

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The way to "know" if text is in Model size is that the size will be in Feet-Inches instead of points.

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If I am correct, the other option is:

1. Change the scale of the view before exploding the DWG
2. Explode
3. Select all text and change to Paper Size
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I have not had to this recently so my recollection might be wrong as to the switch from one to another.

[Anonymous]

I will have to try this on Monday when I'm back in the office. Sounds easy enough.

[Anonymous]

This produced the same results that I’ve been able to do when I change the text. I followed the top part of your instructions because when exploding the DWG the text is automatically placed in paper space.

Maybe the issue is more that the single text box in AutoCAD got changed to multiple individual text lines in ArchiCAD and sit on top of each other rather than just lining up nicely so it's easy to read. Maybe I'm still missing something?

[Eduardo Rolon]

That looks like an Autocad problem where they changed the leading for the Text and it moves up. This usually happens also from AC to Autocad when you do the same thing.
At least the shrinking text problem has been solved?