Carlson has announced its new line-up of desktop software, providing greater functionality for Filipino planners, surveyors and engineers.
Carlson Software 2018 is the first release to include conversions for Bentley Civil, Civil 3D, 12D, ADAC and e-Plan formats.
Carlson Survey’s 2018 version provides support for AutoCAD 2018 and continues to work on AutoCAD versions 2004 and up. All Carlson 2018 office software comes with IntelliCAD 8.2 built-in, which offers a CAD platform for no extra expense.
“Carlson Survey 2018 delivers on many customer feature requests such as the ability to lock selected points in the coordinate database to prevent modifications, and to unlock them if needed,” says David Carlson, V.P. of Development for Carlson Software. “Also, we’ve added many more ways to work with Google Earth, including support for text, image and solid entities and added settings for transparency of data.”
Another notable, time-saving addition is the clean-up for lot linework that automatically finds any overshoots or undershoots and highlights them, giving surveyors the option to quickly fix them.
“Also, to speed and ease subdivision layout,” adds Carlson, “we’ve added a ‘footprint creator,’ which is a library of different house footprints that allows users to quickly choose and place it within their design.”
Intellicad or AutoCAD…is there a difference?
The history of IntelliCAD deserves mention. David C. Arnold was the founder of DCA, a civil engineering software company that developed on top of AutoCAD. DCA was based in Henniker, NH. In the 1990’s, DCA changed its name to Softdesk and went public on the Nasdaq.
Mr. Arnold noticed that in any sales transaction, often the majority of the sales revenue was going to Autodesk for the CAD portion, even though it was his application software that “made” the sale.
Mr. Arnold was determined to develop his own CAD solution and capture more of the total revenue.
So Softdesk had a skunkworks CAD project underway that was “discovered” when Autodesk purchased Softdesk in 1996. The Federal Trade Commission recognized that this would monopolize too much of the CAD technology in one company, namely Autodesk, and they removed this CAD from the acquisition.
The programmers and managers who had developed it eventually created the IntelliCAD Technology Consortium (ITC) where it found a new home. IntelliCAD is now a worthy competitor to AutoCAD.
Anyone who can run AutoCAD can run IntelliCAD. The Commands and Menus are the same.
Improvements in the new Carlson release include:
- Support for Civil 3D 12D, ADAC and e-Plan by import and export functions;
- New pipe special coding in Field-to-Finish that creates pipe polylines with dimension labels and option to draw 3D pipes;
- Field-to-Finish has new special code “PHOTO” for specifying an image to attach to a point symbol;
- Point lists put in by number now can retain their user-specified order in the Point Group Manager;
- The software’s 3D viewer window has also been enhanced to allow for faster zoom, pan and rotate for larger models and to enable view pivot around current view as opposed to just overall model centre;
- New command to find the intersection perpendicular from a point to another point and angle.
Carlson Software has released the 2018 versions of Carlson Civil, Survey, Carlson GIS, and Carlson Hydrology, which, together make up the Carlson Civil Suite. Carlson’s 2018 release also includes: Carlson Point Cloud, Carlson Field, Carlson Mining, Carlson Construction, and Carlson Natural Regrade, all featuring their own industry-specific improvements.
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