The first attempt was a massacre.
Then, she tried the import again, but this time she used and chose the KML as a source. A dialog box appeared—a wise, wrinkled old wizard compared to the brute force of before. She told AutoCAD to use the current geographic coordinate system. She told it to interpret lines as polylines and polygons as closed boundaries. autocad import kml
Lena leaned back, grinning. The KML hadn't just been imported. It had been translated . The architect's vision had survived the journey from the curved sky to the flat map. The first attempt was a massacre
The KML—Keyhole Markup Language—was a creature of the sky. It lived in the curved, spherical world of Google Earth, where lines were drawn on a globe and "straight" was an illusion. AutoCAD lived on the flat, rational Cartesian plane of X and Y. Converting one to the other was like ironing a crumpled map of the world. Something always got stretched. She told AutoCAD to use the current geographic
She double-clicked the file. Google Earth booted up, and the screen filled with a dazzling tangle of neon-yellow lines snaking across a green valley. Trails looped around a lake. A purple polygon marked the lodge. A red circle sat on a flat ridge—the helipad. It looked beautiful. It looked simple. It was a lie.
"Perfect," she muttered, slamming her coffee mug down. "He designed a resort for ants. On a tennis ball."
She knew the enemy now: projection. Google Earth used WGS84, a geographic coordinate system based on latitude and longitude on a sphere. Her drawing was set to State Plane, a grid designed to minimize distortion over a small area. The KML had been flattened like a pancake, and all the juicy terrain data had squirted out the sides.