Referencing a Shapefile into an AutoCAD drawing

[mvolz47]

I was wondering if there was a way to reference an ESRI ArcView shapefile into an AutoCAD drawing without having to import (convert) the shapefile into AutoCAD entities. I was hoping to be able to bring in a "snapshot" of the shapefile into the AutoCAD drawing. I would like to be able to do this because the conversion process between a shapefile and an AutoCAD file is time consuming. Has anyone encountered this problem before? Is this capability built into AutoCAD Map or would you need an add-on package? Any help or hints on this topic would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[Anonymous]

Hi,

No you definitely cannot reference a shapefile
or other external file format.

It isn't that time consuming to convert is it? How
big are your files? If there are many, you could use a script for the
conversion, and run it overnight...

Cheers,

David

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"mvolz47" <mvolz47@aol.com>
wrote in message
href="news:f0b4721.-1@WebX.maYIadrTaRb">news:f0b4721.-1@WebX.maYIadrTaRb...

I
was wondering if there was a way to reference an ESRI ArcView shapefile into
an AutoCAD drawing without having to import (convert) the shapefile into
AutoCAD entities. I was hoping to be able to bring in a "snapshot" of the
shapefile into the AutoCAD drawing. I would like to be able to do this because
the conversion process between a shapefile and an AutoCAD file is time
consuming. Has anyone encountered this problem before? Is this capability
built into AutoCAD Map or would you need an add-on package? Any help or hints
on this topic would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in
advance.