Drawing in Meters in a Stateplane Coordinate System

[Anonymous]

Hi! First time here on the forums and I'm hoping the collective group has an answer for my question. Here goes:

I have imported a .shp file containing some parcels in Riverside County California. The shapefile was in NAD83 California Stateplane Zone VI US Feet so that is what I set my workspace to before I imported the shapefile. Now, I am trying to edit some of the parcels based on some legal descriptions I have. The problem is that the surveyor who created the legal descriptions specified all the distances in meters. When I use the Bearing Distance COGO tool to plot the lines according to the surveyor's descriptions, my lines all show up in feet... rough 1/3 as long as I need them to be. I assume AutoCAD thinks I want to draw in feet because of the coordinate system I chose, but I want to be able to draw in meters so I don't have to convert all the surveyors distances manually.

Any ideas? Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Create a new dwg with a coordinates system of California Stateplane Zone VI
US Meter, attach the dwg with the shape file you import and query all. Then
start drawing away. When done save back all new objects created or just save
the dwg as is.

--

Murph
http://map3d.wordpress.com/


"bjswanner" wrote in message news:6317930@discussion.autodesk.com...
Hi! First time here on the forums and I'm hoping the collective group has an
answer for my question. Here goes:

I have imported a .shp file containing some parcels in Riverside County
California. The shapefile was in NAD83 California Stateplane Zone VI US Feet
so that is what I set my workspace to before I imported the shapefile. Now,
I am trying to edit some of the parcels based on some legal descriptions I
have. The problem is that the surveyor who created the legal descriptions
specified all the distances in meters. When I use the Bearing Distance COGO
tool to plot the lines according to the surveyor's descriptions, my lines
all show up in feet... rough 1/3 as long as I need them to be. I assume
AutoCAD thinks I want to draw in feet because of the coordinate system I
chose, but I want to be able to draw in meters so I don't have to convert
all the surveyors distances manually.

Any ideas? Thanks!

[AllenJessup]

The program doesn't know what unit you're drawing in. Any settings as far as coordinate systems or INSUNIT variables only come in to play when doing conversion. Your parcels look 1/3 too small because of the real world difference between meters and feet.

You can use the excellent method that Murph suggested. But if you only have a few to do, you could just draw the parcels and then scale them by 3.280833333334. That will put your meters in US Survey feet. You wouldn't use this method if you had geodetic coordinates for the parcels. But since you just have deeds you don't have to worry. There will be error anyway because the deeds are usually measured in Ground distance.

Allen