texupport

Certain drawings* previously created in LDT2006, will crash with a fatal error when you try to create a curve table that includes a column with the DELTA ANGLE. If you remove this column, the table works

* I say certain drawings, because we just started working in LDT2008 – we have not determined if this is a universal problem or not. However, I will note that in a new drawing created in LDT2008 – this bug does not occur)

Thanks to RK McSwain for submitting this report.

Workarounds: create the table w/o the DELTA column, then edit the table and put this column back in.
First Appeared: Land Desktop 2008
Status as of 2008 SP1: Still reproducible.
Status as of 2009: (unknown)

In Land Desktop 2008, most profile manipulation commands simply do not work. This is absolutely inexcusable as profiling is integral to all civil design work. This is definitely a bug that warrants a pre-service pack hotfix. Autodesk’s reply to me is as follows:

Thank you for contacting Autodesk Support.

The issue that you are having is a known issue that development is looking into. It occurs when the surface or project name is 10 characters or more. This issue is scheduled to be fixed in the first service pack for the product due out in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, the only workaround available is to rename the surface less than 10 characters. Any alignment that previously referenced this surface will still contain the long surface name and will need to be deleted. If you use the Erase command in your drawing and then Undo, this will remove the alignment and will bring back the linework for you to redefine the alignment. Once this is done, you should be able to successfully recreate the profile and work with sections.

We apologize for the inconvenience this issue may cause. I wish there was an easier solution, but until the service pack is released, this is the best solution we have. Sorry.

Best Regards,

Autodesk Support Team

If a text style only exists in your drawing within a contour style, AutoCAD’s purge command considers it unused.

Workarounds: Create your contour stiyles using a text style that you know will never be purgeable.

First Appeared: Land Desktop 2 (2000)
Status as of 2008: Still reproducible
Status as of 2009: (unknown)

After sampling existing ground, going to PROFILES / CREATE PROFILE / EXISTING PROFILE yields an error, “Error reading surf_head for VRT file”.

Workarounds: This bug seems to be drawing specific rather than project specific or user specific. There are several theories in Autodesks discussion groups. The only time that I encountered it, I was able to correct it by deleting that drawing files CGX and DFM files.

First Appeared: Land Desktop 2 (2000)
Status as of 2008: Still occurs
Status as of 2009: (unknown)

When you’re working in a twisted view, and you turn on LDT’s Northing / Easting tracking, the values reported are several feet off.

Workarounds: Use AutoCAD’s coordinate tracking in the status bar (F6)

First Appeared: Many releases ago
Status as of 2008: Still reproducible
Status as of 2009: (unknown)

Typically, when a selection set includes various kinds of entities, their common features are visible in properties. When a contour is part of a selection set that also includes non-contours, then the color property isn’t available in properties.

 Exhibit A - Selection set of several types of entities.

Exhibit B - Contour added to selection set.

Workarounds: Use the properties toolbar
First Appeared: Land Desktop 2006
Status as of 2008: Still reproducible
Status as of 2009: (unknown)

After installing Land Desktop 2006 with Civil Design and / or Survey 2006 from a silent deployment, you receive a message stating that AutoCAD wasn’t properly installed when launching LDT as a second user.

Caveats: There is a hotfix (see below), but it will only work for new installations. To fix existing installations, you must first uninstall Civil Design and Survey and reinstall them with the repaired distribution.

First Appeared: Land Desktop 2006
Status as of 2006 SP1: Hotfix available
Status as of 2007: This particular cause of “not installed correctly” is assumed to be permanently fixed.

When MBUTTONPAN is set to 0 and you are using a CUSTOM.CUI as your main CUI, with LAND.CUI, EXPRESS.CUI, and CIVIL.CUI as partials, the middle button stops working immediately after using any Land Desktop command.

Workaround: In Config / Profiles, select the current profile and re-set it as current

First Appeared: Land Desktop 2006
Status as of 2006 SP1: Still reproducible
Status as of 2010: (unknown)

Some (but not all) of the blocks that shipped with Land Desktop 2006 have some associated lisp code that runs when they are inserted. It appears that much of this code predated the new interpretation of INSUNITS, and wasn’t updated to account for it. When using Autodesk’s own functions to insert any of these blocks, they will be inserted incorrectly scaled by a factor of 12 when using imperial units. One example is the graphic scale that is inserted via the symbol manager. A better example can be found in Civil Design. Go to Layouts / Sport Fields / Baseball and follow the prompts. If you have INSUNITS set to 2 (as Land Desktop seems to want to force), the baseball field will show up at 1/12th of its intended size.

From looking at the code in baseball.lsp, it appears that the function (ZZ_IN2CU 1) programmatically converts inches to feet, which, as of 2006, should already be handled by INSUNITS. The end result is that the block (which is drawn in architectural units) gets scaled by 1/12 two times – once by Land Desktop (baseball.lsp), and once by AutoCAD (INSUNITS).

Workarounds: Without acknowledging the underlying problem, Autodesk released a very poor workaround. Another workaround might be for you to try to force a semi unitless platform by setting INSUNITSDEFSOURCE and INSUNITEDEFTARGET to 0 for your system. Then you can set INSUNITS to 0 in all of your drawings by putting something like the following code in your acaddoc.lsp.

(if (not (zerop (getvar "insunits")))  (setvar "insunits" 0))

(You might have to tweak this a bit to suit your needs. In fact, I keep ours in a common s::startup function.) Keep in mind, however, that Land Desktop itself tries to set INSUNITS to the value that corresponds to the unit type that you select in PROJECTS / DRAWING SETUP.

First Appeared: Land Desktop 2006
Status as of 2006 SP1: Still reproducible
Status as of 2007: This appears to be corrected. Tough luck, 2006 users.

Note: The INSUNITS issue with Land Desktop 2006 was undoubtedly a true bug, which like most true bugs, was never acknowledged on Autodesk’s knowledge base. Despite the fact that this bug was corrected in LDT 2007, the new (2006+) interpretation of INSUNITS is still very much a nuisance in all versions of AutoCAD. Unfortunately, at this point, this feature is probably considered working as designed. The workarounds described above can still be used with all versions of AutoCAD to come close to replicating the old unitless system.

When listing points (Points > List Points), it can take several minutes to populate the points list.

Workarounds: If you have maximized or otherwise resized your points window, stretching it back to its original size causes the points list to populate as fast as before.

First Appeared: Land Desktop 3
Status as of 2006: Still reproducible
Status as of 2006 SP1: (status unknown / pending feedback)
Status as of 2010: (unknown)