Tracing Survey Data

[Marshall Wright]

Greetings,

I held a site survey up to my laptop and traced its PL and sited the house. The survey is drawn to 1=20' so I set the layer to the same scale.

Why doesn't it scale correctly? Is there some way to treat the screen as a tablet and pick off rough points and scale them correctly?

Thanks in advance.

[CipesDesign]

Hi Marshall

I think what you are attempting can only be done with a 'drawing tablet' , if at all. It may help a little to make sure that your VW drawing is set to 100% zoom, although with certain computers at certain screen resolutions this will not be very accurate.

If possible, I always get the surveyor to send me a dwg file which can be imported and will be perfect (at least as good as the surveyor's work!).

If I must work from a paper survey, I usually start by entering the property boundaries (either using the property line tool available in VW architect/landmark, or simply with lines of specific angle and length) which are usually noted on the survey. Then I use an old-fashioned scale ruler and place the building(s) on the site as accurately as possible (which is marginal at best, but there are cases where close is good enough).

One other possible method is to scan the survey and then use the resulting image file as an underlay for tracing.

Lately, I have been pretty much requiring that clients provide an electronic survey or accept responsibility for the limited accuracy available otherwise.

Good Luck!

Peter Cipes

Residential Designer

Ashland, Oregon