Hello everyone,
I am land surveyor located in the Caribbean island of St. Vincent and I want a program that will read a .dwg file (the format my survey drawings are saved as) and output the area calculations as shown in the attached .txt file.
***ALL FILES DESCRIBED HERE CAN BE DOWNLOADED AT THE FOLLOWING LINK:
Let me give you a synopsis of the situation:
Back in the 1970s and 80s, in the DOS era, there was a surveying software called Rapid Transit. I believed it was developed by a Canadian. This was used widely by our local surveyors. It would save the files in a format called .dat
A local surveyor created another DOS program called Trav that would read the .dat file. The user just has to input the point numbers (which is the name given to the boundary mark) and the program would generate a .txt file which can be opened in notepad (or Word) and printed. The .txt file will show the area or size of the land in square feet. In the attached text file you will see it shows St. Vincent and the Grenadines to the top. That is the accepted format for years.
Fast forward to 2014....Windows 7 and the other modern operating systems don't run DOS programs. I use a program called MicroSurveyCAD. It creates a .dwg file as oppposed to the .dat file created in the old survey program Rapid Transit. MicroSurveyCAD, does the same area calculations. However, it is not outputted in the format required as shown in the text file.
As such, I have to use a DOS emulator called DOSBox in order to run Rapid Transit to create the .dat file. Then run the emulator again to run Trav, load the .dat file and create the .txt file. This is pretty tedious because I have to enter all my points manually. For the life of me, I cannot understand why the department cannot embrace new technologies and move away from those archaic DOS programs.
So in a nutshell, I want a program that can read the .dwg file....have me enter my point numbers......and it will ouput a .txt file in the required format.
I hope this makes sense. You can contact me at [email protected] if you need further clarification.
Thanks and I appreciate your help, time and effort.
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