How to turn a line and curve table in to a drawing

June 2, 2010 6:50 PM

How do I turn a line and a curve table from a plat into a drawing (CAD commands are ok, or importing a spreadsheet would be better.)

The final drawing could be any form, vector or raster. Awesome formats would be SHP or DXF. I am using ProgeCAD, a free CAD program, but I also have access to AutoCAD 98.

This is an example of the line and curve table.

posted by Brent Parker to Technology (4 answers total)

This site might be somewhat helpful, but the instructions don't seem too detailed. I've used Cad for drawing straight chord bearings, but I don't have any experience with curves. I would also like to know if there is a program available that creates drawings from imported plat tables.
posted by Beardsley Klamm at 8:34 PM on June 2, 2010

It seems like it would be relatively straightforward to write a perl script (or python or ruby or whatever your poison is) to read that table and spit out SVG or DXF.
posted by hattifattener at 9:20 PM on June 2, 2010

The ShapeLib Tools allow you to manually build up SHP files from the command line - but SHP doesn't do curves, only line segments.
posted by scruss at 3:28 AM on June 3, 2010

Revit will draw property lines from a metes and bounds table. I bet autocad civil would have a tool for this, too, but I'm not familiar with it. In regular autocad, I've used the manual method outlined in BK's link above. Also, I didn't spend a lot of time looking, but this google search might turn up a LISP routine to automate the process.
posted by Chris4d at 1:02 PM on June 3, 2010 [1 favorite]