spline to a polyline

Any idea how to convert a spline to a polyline?

This has been asked and answered recently. I suggest doing a search of the forum and see what you come up with.

Also check out the threads at the bottom of this page.

I appreciate your quick response but you know how difficult it is to go through google to find what you are looking for and since this information is not in the help command in AutoCad it would remain a valid question.

I really hate drawing polylines over splines to get useful computer information.

What Alan means by searching the forum is to run a search within CADTutor- not a google search.

Also what is meant by the threads at the bottom of this page is self explanatory... scroll down to the bottom, and you'll find related threads.

Thanks guys I see how this works now

Try this...

Try Express Tool Flatten

this was on last week, works wonderfully....

FLATTEN it (I would like to flatten whomever draws with splines. they look pretty but are a pain in the *** to work with!)

beammeup has the idea for sure.

i hate spliners. we have one at my job who is old. like teaching an old dog new tricks he is adament that splines aren't just as good, but are better that polylines. and he is convinced he is great at cad, but he also can't plot things at the right scale and doesn't understand paperspace, hahaha.

i constantly want to flatten him.

use the FLATTEN command.

it is one of the numerous cad commands that exists but is not located anywhere in the help menus or the lists of "all" commands. you can select all the splines at once and flatten them together too.

this becomes especially useful if you are using raster to vector conversion programs. you can scan topo and have a converter program convert it to splines in .dwg format and then flatten them to polylines in cad. and, boom, you have a digitized topo plan with all the lines drawn already. you just have to edit the elevations and put the lines on the layers you want.

we cut about 90% of our digitizing time at my job out when another guy and i figured this one out.

. . . .this becomes especially useful if you are using raster to vector conversion programs. you can scan topo and have a converter program convert it to splines in .dwg format and then flatten them to polylines in cad. and, boom, you have a digitized topo plan with all the lines drawn already.

. . . .

I understand the problems associated with splines when anticipating downstream CAM/CNC processing. Not all CAM systems can reconcile splines.

I don’t actually work (much) with topographical data: What are the major hazards with splines regarding “topo” work?