Why do changes to units for a drawing in C3D 2014 not save?

[RYXTER68]

I work for an engineering company that just made the jump from C3d 2011 to C3d 2014.  I work in the survey department, so I would like to set my angular units to Surveyor's.  I have a drawing that I created in 2011 and had changed these units, opening and closing the drawing over several days with the units staying as surveyor's.  When I opened the drawing in 2014, it reverted to decimal degrees.  I have changed it to Survoyor's units several times, but even if I save it, after closing and reopening it reverts to decimal degrees.  I am having the same problem with my template drawing. Am I now stuck with changing the units every time I open a drawing, or can this be fixed?

[Jay_B]

Where are the Units changes being applied?

Autocad UNITS command?

If I change them here in 2014, close the dwg & open they remain set to surveyors units.

[RYXTER68]

I have tried _units, units, -units, dwgunits, maybe some others, always same result.  I think it might be an environment issue, but where to look? I have tried several drawings including setting a template to surveyor's and it reverts.

C3D 2014 SP2

Windows 7 Pro 64 bit

[Jay_B]

Kind of sounds like a possible system issue.

What happens if you try saving locally, or a different location?

Also, does it work ok on another machine?

[RYXTER68]

Ok,  I had the guy next to me try it on his machine with a different drawing, same result. It will stay with the surveyors units until you close the drawing, even after saving. Our C3d  installation was done from a network with a universal company profile, could this have installed with a setting that does not let this change save?

Rick Daniels

C3D 2014 SP2

Windows 7 Pro 64 bit

[AllenJessup]

It's not recommended that you use the Units command to change to Surveyor's Units. I've never has to do that at all. Of course all my label styles show bearings.

Surveyor's Units isn't an option in the Drawing Setting accessed from the Settings tab in the Toolspace.

You might want to try the AECDWGSETUP command:

Allen

BTW. While this held the setting after a close and reopen in 2014. I still don't recommend doing this.

[Jay_B]

AFAIK, changing UNITS > Angle > Type to Surveyor's Units vs. decimal etc. has little if any effect on the Civil 3d Units in found in Drawing Settings.

One benefit in changing the Angle Type as the OP wishes to do is to be able to see Surveyors Units reported within the Properties Palette and using the Autocad LIST command etc. rather than seeing a decimal degrees output.

While I normally work with Decimal Degrees there are times when I want to see the Survey Units displayed while using various vanilla cad features.

If the Angle Type is changed to Surveyor's Units in the UNITS command, it's also changing it in the AECDWGSETUP location shown and visa versa.

They're the same exact setting.

In any case the OP still has an issue which is handcuffing his ability to save basic drawing settings normally, whether UNITS are be specified somehow at startup etc.

[AllenJessup]

My info may be way out of date. In some of the early training on Civil 3D I remember being told that setting to anything other than Decimal Degrees would yield unexpected results.

When I used the AECDWGSETUP command in Civil 3D, IDSP 2014 SP2 to change the units on my current drawing, save the drawing, close the drawing and then reopen the drawing. The setting stuck.

If the OP tries that and it still reverts. I'd guess that either they have a Lisp to set certain variables when a drawing is opened or possibly a 3rd party software.

Allen

[david.zavislan]

Look for the acad.lsp and acaddoc.lsp file and see if there is a line in them that is setting the AUNITS variable to 0:

    (setvar "AUNITS" 0)

If this is in the acaddoc.lsp file, it will reset your angular units for every drawing that you open.

Enter the following lisp code at the command line to find the acaddoc.lsp file that your Civil 3D is using:

    (findfile "acaddoc.lsp")

[wfberry]

The SURVEYORS units was set up way back in regular AutoCad.  When DCA and Softdesk came along, SURVEYORS was not used because the various surveying add-ons took care of this internally.   Civil 3D has continued this tradition.

Bill

[jmayo-EE]

Perhaps changing the ambient settings in the dwg will help the OP. See the attachment.