The Wish Software Blog: New Features in AutoChart 2010.00.02

Now that we're settled in at our new office, I thought it would be a good opportunity to discuss a few of the new features in the latest version of AutoChart (2010.00.02) that was released at the end of last month.

Probably the most important feature for those of you upgrading to AutoCAD 2011 is that the 2010.00.02 AutoChart is fully compatible with this latest version of AutoCAD. Indeed, to be able to use AutoChart with AutoCAD 2011, the new release must be installed as earlier versions are not compatible.

So, in this first post, I'll cover a few new and modified commands to do with creating and working with longitudinal profiles.

One of the most useful improvements is that the Xref Profile command has been fully updated to draw the Depth Axis and Kp Axis as well as automatically positioning the profile from the single command. The previous version of the command involved a few workarounds and was not particularly intuitive (until you knew how it worked!) whereas now the command works in a similar manner to the Create Profile command, except that the Profile source is a drawing rather than an ASCII file.

The Xref Profile command can be run as Current Drawing (by specifying the Panel Start Kp) or as Chart Series (where the Profile Xref is positioned according to the Plan View UCS). With either version of the command you can select to have automatic vertical positioning of the profile Xref by specifying an Upper/Middle/Lower position or fix the top of the Profile box to a particular value by using the 'Force Grid Start Depth' option and entering the required value.

As with the previous Xref Profile command the drawing to be inserted must be created in Pseudo Real World coordinates (i.e. the X-axis must be (Grid) Kp in metres with Kp 0 at X=0 and the Y-axis must be depth vertically exaggerated, e.g. Depth 0 at Y=0, Depth of 75m with a vertical exaggeration of 50 must be at Y=-3750. Finally, for Ascending Kp Charts the Kps of the Xreffed profile must travel from left to right, for Descending Kp Charts the profile must be mirrored around X=0 so that the Kps travel from right to left. It is usually easiest to use the Create Profile - Current Drawing command with the Calculate Panel Extents from Data option ticked in order to draw the profile data in the correct position.

Note that one of the profile polylines in the profile Xref must have been designated as the AutoChart 'Primary' profile. If this tag does not exist (for instance if the profile was not originally created in AutoChart) then this can be done using the new Attach Profile Info command.

Once the Profile Xref has been added to the charts, if required, a new command Move Profile Xref can be used to adjust the position of the inserted profile. This command allows the user to drag the profile to a new location within the chart panel and then adjusts the Kp Axis and Depth Axis to match. The command then re-applies the XCLIP around the profile panel and updates the chart's profile dictionary.

The new Enable Profile command allows the User to write an AutoChart Profile Dictionary to an existing longitudinal profile within a chart or drawing. The profile dictionary holds the information that relates the position of the profile within the drawing to its real world Kp and depth extents and needs to be present in order for AutoChart to be able to add further relative data (such as sub bottom profile data) to the longitudinal profile. The Enable Profile command creates the profile dictionary for longitudinal profiles that have been created without AutoChart or that have lost this information during the charting process.

The Enable Profile command should be run from within the drawing that has the required profile to be enabled.

When the command is run, the AutoChart dictionary is presented on the command line and written to the drawing as an AutoChart object within the drawing.

Name: Demo_001a_T_1

Bottom Left: 1124.9999998,3850
Top Right: 4699.0125752,6400
Start Kp: 6.55149e-007
End Kp: 3.57537
Scale Factor: 0.99962
Top Depth: -99.0
Bottom Depth: -201.0
Vertical Exaggeration: 25.0

The Show Profile Information command can also be used to view these values.

Another new feature is that the Create Profile command has been modified so that a 'Break at Distance' value can be added to a Custom Format ini file which causes the profile polyline to not be drawn between consecutive points that exceed the specified value. This functionality is only applied when a Custom profile format is used with the appropriate value defined in the header of the ini file.

i.e.

#AutoChartName,ColumnPosition
#BreakOnDistance,10
Kp,1
Burial,2

The above example will not draw the profile polyline between consecutive points that have Kp values that are more than 10m apart. The functionality is activated when the line #BreakOnDistance,x (where x is the required break interval) is inserted in the header of the custom format ini file.

Finally on the subject of Creating Profiles, An option has been added to the Create Profile Dialog that allows the user to add any piece of text as a suffix to the vertical axis text. For instance a suffix of 'm' could be added to the axis values to indicate depth in metres or 'mV' used for a Cathodic Potential profile.

To add a suffix, just type the required value into the Text Suffix textbox in the Create Profile Dialog. If the textbox is left blank then no suffix will be added.

There is also now the option to add a background hatch to the longitudinal profile box (i.e. a 'Sea' hatch). Whilst this functionality has been previously available on request to certain Customers based on their Dongle ID, there was no way to turn off the option once it had been implemented. The addition of a 'Hatch Background' tick box in dialog means that the feature is available to all Users if required and can also be turned off if necessary for other profile panel types (e.g. when creating a CP profile).

To enable the Profile background hatch check the tick box in the Dialog: