Align Command

If you need to Move and Rotate and possibly even Scale a portion of a job to match another, in older versions of MSCAD each of these steps had to be done 1 at a time with the appropriate commands. MSCAD2005 can now use the ALIGN command to do all of these steps at the same time. The Align command is found under the Modify menu. When you run it you will see prompts like this: : align Select entities: <- Window or individually pick the entities to align Entities in set: 3 Select entities: <- Press enter to finish picking entities. Specify first source point: <- Pick the first point to match from Specify first destination point: <- Pick the first point to match to Specify second source point: <- Pick the second point to match from Specify second destination point: <- Pick the second point to match to Specify third source point: <- press enter unless you are working on 3D faces (not common in surveying) Scale objects based on alignment points [Yes/No] : <- you decide, then press enter. In this example below, you can see the red lines that need to be aligned to the yellow lines.

If you follow the prompts and pick the appropriate locations (as labelled in this example), and if you decide not to scale the entities, you will get this as the final result. The red lines are rotated and moved to match the yellow line but are not scaled. 

‚ If you answer yes to the scale option you would get this as a final result.

The red lines are rotated and moved to match the yellow line and are scaled to match the size of the yellow line. If the red lines also had survey points attached to them, when selecting the entities to align, be sure to select the survey points as well (easy way would be to window them all) To ensure the survey points are selected, you must have the layer On and Thawed that the point is on. Typically this would be the MSPOINT layer, unless changed/set manually or via AutoMAP.

The survey points will be aligned with the linework and the database will be updated to show the newly aligned coordinate positions (even if you scaled the entities as well).

Glen W. Cameron, C.E.T.

Technical Support Manager