a PDF version of this issue.

VOLUME 18
THE WORLD’S LARGEST CIRCULATION MICROSTATION® PRINT PUBLICATION
ISSUE 8
MicroStation
®
Whether you work in V8, V8i or PowerDraft, there
is an inexpensive alternative to I/RAS B for editing
raster reference files. Page 1.
Tips & Tricks
Changes to CAD Standards? No
Problem!
Getting changes to your CAD standards used to
be a real pain. Fortunately, there’s a fast, easyto-use solution, whether you need to change a
few or thousands of design files. Page 2.
TODAY
Time-saving MicroStation News
PDF Your Entire MicroStation
Cell Library in Under 5 Minutes
Tired of searching
around for cells?
By Rick DeWitt
You’re in charge of getting everybody on your
company’s latest engineering design project
CHANGE SERVICE REQUESTED
PRESORTED STANDARD
U.S. POSTAGE PAID
TAMPA‚ FL
PERMIT NO. 8107
Axiom
1805 Drew Street
Clearwater‚ Florida 33765 USA
MicroStation News
Having a PDF of a Cell Library Makes it
Easy to Find the Right Cell, Right Now
Do your cell libraries have hundreds (or thousands) of cells? Need a way to easily distribute
a visual guide to your users? It only takes a
few minutes. Find out how. Page 1.
Axiom News
Need a Full-featured Raster Reference
File Editor Without a Full-featured Price
Tag?
Here’s an affordable way to edit color, grayscale and monochrome raster images — without leaving MicroStation — whether you use
MicroStation V8, V8i or PowerDraft. Page 1.
CAD Managers’
Educational Backgrounds
High School Diploma
Four-year College Degree
Some College, No Degree
Graduate College Degree
Two-year College Degree
Source: www.cadalyst.com
Robert Green, October 2010
Having CAD standards change in the middle of
a project can be costly. Here’s how to get this
roadblock out of your way — fast! Page 2.
up to speed and productive. The customer
has supplied you with
the cell library, seed
files and standards that
have to be followed.
You open the V8 cell
library and discover
that there are over three
hundred cells and they
all use the old, cryptic, six-character cell
names.
You realize that the
only way to get your
drafters to find the correct cells, without wasting valuable production
time, is to provide them
with an easy-to-access,
visual presentation of
the cells in this library.
Figure 1. CellManager™ automatically creates a cell library notebook in
PDF format — complete with a table of contents — resulting in ease of
distribution and increased speed in finding the cells you need on any
project.
Cell Library to
PDF in About Five
Minutes
With CellManager, you
could have what you
need in about five minutes. How?
1. Start up Micro­
Station V8 and open
the cell library you
want to document.
2. Start CellManager
by selecting “CellManager for V8”
from the “Axiom”
pull-down menu in
MicroStation.
3. In CellManager’s
main dialog box,
See “Cell Library
to PDF in Under 5
Minutes” on page 2.
PowerDraft V8i Users Now Have a Low-cost
Solution for Editing Raster Reference Files
Easily edit color, grayscale or monochrome raster images from within MicroStation.
Clearwater, ­Florida,
USA — Axiom, one of
the world’s most experienced developers
of time-saving CAD
software products, announces the release of
a version of its popular MicroStation raster
reference file editing
tool, RasterDgn™, for
Bentley’s PowerDraft
V 8 i . P r e v i o u s l y,
RasterDgn was only
available for use with
MicroStation.
RasterDgn is an affordable alternative to
high-priced color and
monochrome raster
reference file editors
such as MicroStation
I/RAS B or Descartes.
Wi t h R a s t e r D g n ,
us ers c an manipulate either monochrome or color raster
reference files from
within MicroStation
or PowerDraft with
minimal training.
RasterDgn modifies
attached raster reference files directly.
According to
RasterDgn includes direct raster editing features — without leaving MicroStation or PowerDraft
— such as delete, copy and move.
Axiom product manager, Eiren Smith,
“RasterDgn’s intuitive
user interface makes
raster reference file
editing so simple that
it requires little or
no training for new
users. Configuration
for administrators is
extremely straightforward, making it
very easy to roll out
RasterDgn at each site.”
Axiom reports
that RasterDgn for
PowerDraft V8i contains all the same
features as RasterDgn
for Mi c ro St at i on .
RasterDgn allows users
to edit raster reference
files, without having
to leave MicroStation
or PowerDraft.
RasterDgn’s main features include the ability
to:
• Copy, move or delete raster pixels.
• A u t o m a t i c a l l y
deskew crooked
raster files.
See “Affordable
Raster Reference File
Editor” on page 2.
www.AxiomInt.com • Fax 727-442-8344
Page 2 • MicroStation Today
Affordable Raster Tips & Tricks
Reference File
How to Quickly Handle
CAD Standard Changes
Editor
— Mid-project!
Continued from page 1
• Automatically remove
noise (“speckles”) from
monochrome raster
reference files, usually caused by dust, dirt
or other imperfections
present when drawings
were scanned.
• Easily convert vector
data drawn over the
raster reference file into
raster data in the raster
reference file.
All of RasterDgn’s functions can be undone
with MicroStation’s and
PowerDraft’s undo comm an d. Ac c ord i ng to
Axiom, RasterDgn is designed to require only
about 10 to 15 minutes of
training for new users.
RasterDgn for
PowerDraft V8i is available
for delivery and carries the
same price as RasterDgn.
Find Out How Easy it
Is to Edit Raster Files.
Call Now!
To receive a free trial version or for more information on RasterDgn, contact
an Axiom MicroStation
Consultant today. Call
727-442-7774 extension
2494 or e-mail 2494@
AxiomInt.com now! MST
Cell Library to
PDF in Under 5
Minutes
Continued from page 1
make sure the open
cell library is shown in
the “Files:” field. If not,
click the {Select…} button to open the “Choose
Files to Process” dialog
box and select your cell
library.
Settings” and select the
standard MicroStation
“PDF” plot configuration file and “ANSI
A” paper size. (“ANSI”
stands for “American
National Standards
Institute”. “ANSI A” is
a notation for a paper
size of 8.5 by 11 inch-
Rick DeWitt, Axiom Senior
Product Manager, has
been helping CAD users
with their MicroStation
problems for more than 16
years.
By R ick DeWit t,
Axiom Senior
Product Manager
Have you ever had a situation where a project’s
CAD standards changed
after the project started?
Did you or your users
spend hours — or days
— manually updating
design files because of
it? Does your management appreciate under
budget or high-profit
projects? (Don’t spend
a lot of time on this last
one, because I’m sure
they do!)
Let’s take one simple but typical example. You have
a project that started with CAD standards you were
asked to follow. After the project hits 75 percent completion, you find out that the font they now want you
to use is “Arial”, instead of the “Working” font recommended at the start of the project. There are several
hundred files already created for the project and every
one of them needs to be fixed. What do you do?
SpecChecker™ is best known for its ability to perform CAD standard checks on MicroStation files
based on “rules” that define your specific CAD standard. Another aspect of SpecChecker, that not everyone
knows about, is that SpecChecker can also make many
kinds of changes to elements. Add this to SpecChecker’s
ability to run in a batch process on tens or hundreds
or thousands of files at the same time and you have a
powerful solution for making required changes at any
point in the project’s development.
SpecChecker lets you correct many things including level, color, weight, style, text height, text width
and font. For instance, SpecChecker can change the
font for any text element anywhere in any number of
design files you select. This includes text found inside
cells and even text defined inside shared cell definitions (cell definitions that are found in the non-graphic section of a design file rather than in a cell library).
Using SpecChecker’s “Rule Wizard”, you can create a rule that finds every text element in any number
of design files that does not use “Arial” for a font and
change the font to “Arial”. Anyone could create the
Figure 2. CellManager makes it easy for you to create a
page that will display up to 25 cells (models) per page.
You can also choose from a variety of page sizes using
the “Change Settings” dialog box.
4. From CellManager’s
m a i n d i a l o g b ox ,
click Settings | Change
Set tings… to open
CellManager’s “Change
Settings” dialog box
(Figure 2). Now, adjust
the “Page Settings” to
25 models per page.
Next, click on “Plot
es.) Click {OK} to close
the dialog box.
5. C l i c k t h e { D r a w
Pages…} button from
CellManager’s main dialog box (Figure 3) to
open the “Draw Pages”
dialog box.
6. Then, click the {Draw
Pages} button on the
Figure 3. After selecting which cells to work with, the
{Draw Pages...} button opens a “Draw Pages” dialog box
that gives you various options for drawing, plotting
and displaying your cell notebook pages.
Figure 4. The magic begins when you click on {Draw
Pages} and the cells are generated on screen. Clicking
{Create Plots} saves a PDF file of your cell library. When
done, just click on {Display…} to view your freshlyminted PDF file.
“Draw Pages” dialog
box (Figure 4) to have
CellManager automatically generate the page
graphics you will use for
your documentation.
7. With the pages all set
for plotting, simply
click the {Create Plots}
button (Figure 4) on
the “Draw Pages” dialog box. CellManager
automatically generates each page of the
Call 727-442-7774 extension 2710 in the United States.
PDF and then combines all the pages into
a single PDF file. Once
the PDF file is created,
an “Information” dialog box pops up giving
you the exact name and
location of the newly
created PDF file. Your
new file will have the
same name as the cell
library, but will have a
“.pdf” extension.
8. Click {OK} to close the
rule needed to do this in about a minute. Here’s how…
1. Open SpecChecker and in the “Rules File:” field
type a name for your new rules file that describes what you want it to do. For example:
“C:\Program Files \Axiom\v8\Checker\
Sample\TextToArial.rul”
Figure 1. Not only can SpecChecker show you all
the elements that do not comply with your CAD
standards, it can also correct most of the errors it finds
according to the rules you define — automatically!
2. Now choose Tools | Rule Wizard… from
SpecChecker’s main menu. Since this rules file
does not exist yet, the Rule Wizard opens showing an empty file as in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Using SpecChecker’s Rule Wizard, you can
quickly create rules to check — and correct — many
common element attributes that MicroStation
CAD managers want to enforce such as level, color,
weight, style, font and text size.
3. Now, we just click the {New Rule…} button to
start building our rule. This opens a dialog box,
which lets us select the type of rule we are building. Because we want to reject text that doesn’t have
Figure 3. SpecChecker rules either “Reject” or
“Accept” elements in design files. They can do this
based on specific element criteria or they can “Reject
All” or “Accept All” elements as a starting condition.
See “Keeping Up
with Changes to CAD
Standards” on page 3.
information dialog box
and return to the “Draw
Pages” dialog box.
9. Fi n a l l y, c l i c k t h e
{Display...} button on
the “Draw Pages” dialog
box (Figure 4) to open
your newly created cell
library documentation!
In about five minutes,
you’ve created a beautiful,
easy-to-use PDF file documenting all your cells (over
300 in this example) that
you can easily distribute
to your staff. How’s that for
efficiency?
Want Cell Library
Documentation Fast?
Call Now!
To receive a free trial version or for more information on CellManager,
contact an Axiom
MicroStation Consultant
today. Call 727-442-7774
extension 2353 or e-mail
2353@AxiomInt.com now!
MST
Need to make global changes
to your MicroStation files?
Find out how to
modify — in batch
— text, elements and
settings in your design files.
Call 727-442-7774
extension 2636 or visit
www.AxiomInt.com/global-file-changer.
E-mail 2710@AxiomInt.com.
www.AxiomInt.com • Fax 727-442-8344
Page 3 • MicroStation Today
Keeping Up with Changes to CAD Standards
Continued from page 2
again. The dialog should now look like this (Figure 6):
the correct font, we choose the “Reject” radio button and then click {Next}. (See Figure 3.)
4. The next step is to create a list of selection criteria that defines the types of elements we want to
change. We do this using “keywords”. To see a full
list of keywords to select from, click the {Select...}
button next to the “Keyword” field.
7. Since this is the only automatic correction we’re
going to do for this simple example, click the {Next}
button to add the finished rule to the list of rules.
Rule Wizard will start you back at the beginning
dialog for creating additional rules. As this is the
only rule that we’ll do for this example, just click
the {Cancel} button to close that dialog box and return to our list of rules (Figure 9). That’s really all
there is to setting up a rule.
Figure 6. The listed criteria specifies which elements
will be accepted or rejected by the rule we are
building — in this example, text nodes and nodes (as
in Figure 5) that do not use the “Arial” font. Remember
that “!=” means “does not equal”.
Figure 4. Using keywords, SpecChecker’s Rule Wizard
allows you to easily select the element criteria that
you want to use to limit your rule. There are many
keywords to choose from including those for cell
name, level, file name, model, text style, line style and
many others.
5. To proceed, we click the {Next} button, and now we
create the message we want to put in our report file
for each text nodes or text element we change. This
message can say anything you want but for our example we will use “Changing this text to Arial font”
and click the {Next} button again. (See Figure 7.)
Figure 9. The “Rules” dialog box shows you all of the
rules that SpecChecker will use as it goes through
— in batch — all of the files you choose and either
makes the corrections automatically or (if you prefer)
with user interaction.
For our example, we want to change text nodes (type
7) and text (type 17), so we select them from the list of
element types and then click the {OK} button.
Figure 7. Every rule that rejects elements puts a
message in the SpecChecker report file for each
element it rejects. The message can say anything you
want and can include variables that will update with
things like the rejected element’s level, color or style.
Figure 5. You can select from a list of element types
MicroStation recognizes when creating rules.
SpecChecker will automatically modify the elements
(based on the rules) in batch.
For this example, we set the operator to “=” (equals)
and then we click the {Add to List} button to add this
element criteria. We then create our next criteria statement in the same way, but this time we will select the
keyword “FONT” from the keyword list, set the operator
to “!=” (not equal) and add the font name “Arial” to the
“Values:” field before clicking the {Add to List} button
6. We are now ready for the last part of the rule, which
is creating the correction we want to make to any
text node or text element that does not use the
“Arial” font. This dialog works like the element selection criteria except you can only select one value
for each correction keyword, and the operator is
always “=”, so it doesn’t show a choice. In our example, we are going to change the font of rejected
elements to “Arial” so we select the “FONT” keyword and set the “Value:” to “Arial” and then click
the {Add to List} button (Figure 8).
8. From here, you simply click the {Close} button and
then the {Save} button when it asks you if you want
to save the changes to your rules file. This will take
you back to SpecChecker’s main dialog box.
To make this modification to tens, hundreds or thousands of files automatically, simply pick all the files you
want to change from SpecChecker’s main dialog box,
make sure the “Search only” and “Interactive editing”
checkboxes are unchecked in the main dialog and click
the {Start} button to handle the whole problem fast.
Although this article illustrates a very simple example, SpecChecker can also be used to select and modify elements in an extremely precise and sophisticated
manner.
Call Now!
For more information on SpecChecker or to obtain
a free trial version, contact an Axiom MicroStation
Consultant today! Call 727-442-7774 extension 2620,
e-mail 2620@AxiomInt.com or visit Axiom on the Web
at www.AxiomInt.com now!
Send Us Your MicroStation Tips!
Figure 8. With SpecChecker, you can optionally correct
many things about an element such as level, color,
weight, style and font. In this example, we are telling
SpecChecker to change the rejected text element’s
font to “Arial”.
Solve MicroStation
Problems Fast!
MicroStation Acceleration Garage
Send your favorite MicroStation tip or trick to
MsTips@AxiomInt.com. We will give you full credit for
the tip and your peers will look at you with reverence. MST
60
40
20
80
MPH
100
(MicroStation Productivity per Hour)
120
140
™
Garage includes tools that allow you to:
0
160
• Train on MicroStation, GEOPAK, InRoads and AutoCAD without
leaving your desk!
• Easily edit raster reference files — in color — without leaving
MicroStation!
• Solve any MicroStation reference file problem fast!
• And much more!
• Import spreadsheet and word processing data into MicroStation with • Perform quality-assurance checks on your MicroStation files quickly
and easily!
perfect formatting!
• Make unlimited changes to multiple design files quickly and easily!
• Achieve title block consistency automatically!
• Take control of your MicroStation cell libraries!
Call 727-442-7774 extension 2710 in the United States.
For more information on Garage, call 727-442-7774 extension
1642, e‑mail 1642@AxiomInt.com or visit Axiom on the Web at
www.AxiomInt.com!
E-mail 2710@AxiomInt.com.
www.AxiomInt.com • Fax 727-442-8344
Page 4 • MicroStation Today
Get Translations Between DGN and
DWG Files Done Right the First Time!
With Translation Manager,™
you can:
• Avoid messy translations
between MicroStation
and AutoCAD.
• Simplify the process of
translating files between
MicroStation and
AutoCAD and improve
the results.
• Get your translations
done right the first time!
Translating files using MicroStation’s or AutoCAD’s built-in translator
alone often creates messy files requiring someone to spend hours
fixing each file after the translation. In some cases, it’s faster to recreate
CAD files from scratch, rather than trying to correct translated design
or drawing files. Some of the more common types of problems with
translated files include fonts that don’t map correctly, problems with
element or entity symbology (such as incorrect style, weight or color),
incorrect units (DWG units or MicroStation working units), symbols
(such as degree symbols) that come out wrong, lost levels (when
translating from MicroStation) and lost layers (when translating from
AutoCAD).
Call 727-442-7774 extension 2334,
e-mail 2334@AxiomInt.com or
visit Axiom on the Web at
www.AxiomInt.com now!
Use a QR (“quick response”) code reader on
your smart phone to get
more information on
Translation Manager.
Copyright 1995–2011 Axiom. All Rights Reserved. Acceleration Garage, CellManager, Global File Changer, RasterDgn, SpecChecker and Translation Manager are trademarks of Axiom. MicroStation‚ PowerDraft, V7, V8, V8i and InRoads are trademarks of Bentley Systems‚ Incorporated.
Neither Axiom nor MicroStation Today are affiliated with Bentley Systems‚ Incorporated. GEOPAK is a trademark of GEOPAK Corporation. Axiom is not an affiliate or licensee of GEOPAK Corporation. Other trademarks are held by their respective owners. Not responsible for inadvertent
errors.
Call 727-442-7774 extension 2710 in the United States.
E-mail 2710@AxiomInt.com.