language conversion

[Anonymous]

I have a set of e-plan drawings that I need to convert from German to English.  Is this possible if I pull them into a AutoCad Electrical project?  I would have thought if the eplan used attributes it would work, but so far it is not.  Any suggestions?

[dougmcalexander]

EPlan runs on a proprietary database platform.  There is no direct conversion possible.  AutoCAD Electrical is the only software of its type that stores that component data in AutoCAD's native attribute format.  This is one of the advantages of AutoCAD Electrical.  Anyone with a .DWG reader can see the data by viewing the attribute values within the symbols. 

[Anonymous]

Is there perhaps any third-party software, or company that could convert between the two?

We have some schematics drawn in Germany in E-Plan that need to be worked on over here in our US office, which does not have E-Plan.

Any thoughts?

[dougmcalexander]

You can take a DXF file from EPlan and use the tools on the conversion menu tab within AutoCAD Electrical to convert the blocks in the DXF file to equivalent AutoCAD Electrical blocks.  The Block Replacement tool is an automated way to handle this, once you set up the mapping spreadsheet.  You can even convert the lines that represent wires to actual wires.  You can also convert  text entity to a wire number.  There are many options on the conversion menu tab for converting everything from dumb graphics or blocks from other software so they work within the AutoCAD Electrical editing environment.  You can save them as DWG files or DXF them out again.  This is one of the subjects we cover in my advanced training course.