Yes, it originates in AutoCAD. Thanks for the help, I appreciate you spending the time to reply.

There is a plot option in AutoCAD that lets you plot directly to a PDF. I tried that earlier but it didn't seem to want to load any of the data into MoI.

BUT, your import type field did give me an idea. Part of the adobe bundle that I have at work (I only use photoshop) is ILLUSTRATOR.

What DOES work for me (IM VERY VERY EXCITED) is to plot from AutoCAD -> PDF format then bring that PDF into illustrator and save that as an .AI file. Doing that brings
in all of the 2d lines that I need to work with. I hope this helps someone that may not have RHINO but happens to have the CS3 creative suite with illustrator.

Thanks again for your ideas and help!!!

Hi Rado, I'm glad that you have got a better solution.

Could you please post one of the PDFs out of AutoCAD that will not load into MoI directly? I'd like to take a look at it to see if I can make that work better.

And what about SATOUT from AutoCAD, is that not available anymore in AutoCAD or did that not work?

- Michael

I use the pdf route sometimes, which works for me. The pdf s exported by my cad app are read by MoI. Also the pdf printer option mentioned by Michael is good too. I use Cute PDF Writer and MoI reads that vector data perfectly. Going via illustrator seems hard to me.

One quick note on the PDF printer method - one thing that can be not so good about that is that method will tend to make curved outlines (like a spline curve or a circle) get diced up into a bunch of small line segments.

Basically the PDF file will get whatever data was sent to the printer and it is not unusual for programs to dice up curves into small lines when sending print data.

But things that are made up of straight lines will work fine with that.

- Michael

SATOUT doesn't seem to be a valid command in AutoCAD 2007. They also used to have an option to save as an IGES file but apparently that is no longer available in this version of ACAD.

I attached a sample boilerplate plan that is our autocad template file at work (the large plan has all of the linetypes, symbols, etc that we commonly use, this is just a small portion of it).

It doesn't seem to read when imported into MoI. I guess it would be nicer for people who don't have illustrator to be able to skip that step altogether. I'm not sure if this PDF problem is a common one or just something specific to the way that AutoCAD exports the lineweights etc...

Again thanks for your help. It's very very nice to be able to directly speak to the developer.

Hi Rado, thanks for posting the example file.

MoI's PDF importer code had a bug where it was not handling a particular kind of nested declaration properly which the AutoCAD output happened to use.

It's fixed up now for the next beta so that MoI will be able to read these PDFs directly.


re: AutoCAD SATOUT, well that is really a bummer that they took that out. Yeah they also a long time ago had IGESOUT as well but that one was removed quite a while ago.

- Michael

Thanks for taking a look at the file. It will be nice to be able to skip the illustrator step.

It's really quite weird how (with autocad) they've added so much functionality in some areas while a the same time pairing down the export options. You would think that they would want to keep those exporters to allow for greater interoperability between their vast product suite.