How to Tell a 'Bad Map' from a 'Good Map' and Save Hours

Written by Tom Samuels on

Here's how to tell which CAD maps will need a lot of formatting work doing.

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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

''Hello, today I'm going to be identifying the differences between a good and a bad map and to start I'm going to show you some reasons why a map can be considered bad. This is basically comes down to features that don't exist that I just going to make editing and using your map and more flexible manner it's going to take a lot of time to create and so all the information is now in one place which is going to create a lot of time when you're gonna do something like I'm gonna show you now for example if you wanted to separate the roads onto say a different layer I'm just going to give that a line style to turn straight this you're gonna have to be selecting the roads manually and then changing changing them to the layer and so yeah depending on the size of the map this this could take a lot of time and then one thing that you can see here that's a bit problematic is how these how these arcs are split into quite small segments so you can quite easily miss a piece of roads and have that on a long layer and this is going to be the same if you want to say create a building layer I'll just create another new layer here and I'll show this is this green make that my current layer so let's say I want to
create some hatches so I find it's quite useful to have your your buildings as a separate field layer as well as having a different outline if you ever want to do such a thing as a usage diagram for example that can be quite useful and here you can see a problem where these ones have filled quite quickly AutoCAD has seen a closed shape and filled it here due to some bad line work we we can't do that so that again creates more work more issues more time not just having to do this yourself manually but also potentially having to deal with some bad line work and then the last thing I'm going to show you on this map is how the test has come in it hasn't come through as text but it's confused as line work so this means I've got no option to say change the fonts or what's written and to show you how this these issues you know can work I'll show you the latest map serve simple map where we have layers clearly named clearly defined so if I wanted to quickly change the colours to all the buildings to be green that's done in a click of a button I've identified the layer and and how I can then change that and the same with text here this text is is real text so I've got the the option to change the font or if I need to I can add some text author and edit that so this is going to having a map set up with these layers it's world war we don't have that issue with geometry being all over the place it's all very clear it's where it should be and the layers clearly named editable so that I can change you know that again so for all the building outliers to be read it's just done quite quickly from that layer.''

Written by Tom Dawson