Block Scaling Problem in Land Desktop 2006

Have you noticed the Datum block looks very small in Profiles created with Civil Design 2006? This is just a symptom for a much wider spread problem. A change in AutoCAD behavior has occurred. Now AutoCAD tries to adjust the scale of drawings you insert by reading the UNITS setting embedded in the drawing. The default AutoCAD UNITS are INCHES for most of the drawings that come with Land Desktop. As you can guess your drawings are probably done in feet but the Datum block for profiles has it's UNITS set to Inches. Now your Datum block is 12 times too small.

The Fix

Change the UNITS setting in the drawings that you insert before you insert them. You can redefine the blocks that already exhibit this problem in existing drawings by inserting the source file then answer Yes to the Redefine Block? prompt.

Civil Batch Drawing Converter

Autodesk recognizes this problem and therefore created a utility titled, "Civil Batch Drawing Converter." Click Here to find the Civil Batch Drawing Converter. This utility allows you to change UNITS settings on multiple drawings so they scale properly. Once installed you type a command CivilBatchConverter on the command line to run the utility. There is no mention of an uninstall in the readme file. Set a system restore point before installing the utility just in case things go wrong.