• Archicad 10
• Project Migration
• What is inevitably lost in translation

What is inevitably lost in translation

When you migrate a PlotMaker 9 Layout Book to ArchiCAD 10, there are certain types of information that are lost in the conversion process.
Here is a list of what these are and why these are lost.

Master Layouts: Multi-Paper Master Layouts are not supported in ArchiCAD 10, so any such information is lost (this includes number of pages horizontally/vertically, Overlapping settings between these pages, plus any Printing/Plotting options related to Multi-Paper Layouts).

Book Settings: Output Color settings (which specify how elements drawn on Layouts should be output – All Colors to Black/Grayscale/Color) do not come through, because there is no equivalent in ArchiCAD 10.

Drawing Settings: if a Drawing was placed in PlotMaker 9 in such a way that its layer combination was changed in the program, this setting will be lost and the Drawing will be displayed in ArchiCAD 10 with the layer combination originally specified for the Drawing.

Also, in case the Text & Markers field is set to the Fix Size option, this setting will not come through to ArchiCAD 10, and the Resize to Output Scale options will always be used.

Publishing Contacts: Contacts will not come through to ArchiCAD 10. However, in PlotMaker 9, you may save these Contacts into a file and open that Contacts file in ArchiCAD 10 after opening the PlotMaker 9 LBK file.

Line Weights: Custom line weights set for Linear elements (Line, Arc/Circle, Polyline, Spline) and the contours of Fills do not come through, because there is no equivalent in ArchiCAD 10.

If you have a PlotMaker Layout Book which you wish to merge into an ArchiCAD 10, the PLN file into which Layout Book data is merged already has Layouts in it (since in ArchiCAD 10, every Project File must contain both Model Views and a Layout Book as default), and these Layouts have all their attributes and various settings specified. The Merge procedure follows the usual rules of merging, which means that in case certain settings exist in the receiving file, existing data is used, and are not overwritten by merged data. Therefore, when merging Layout Book data into a PLN file, the following settings of the Layout Book are not carried through:

• • Book settings
  • Project Info
  • Grid settings
  • Default Master Layout setting
  • The Pen Set of the Layout Book
  

Settings in the Layouts page of Project Preferences Dialog in ArchiCAD 10 will not be modified by such Preferences data of the merged Layout Book, so the latter will be lost.
Attributes and Master Layouts of the merged Layout Book are checked whether existing Attributes/Master Layouts exist in the file. Please note that only names are checked (but not content or definition) when checking for matching Attributes/Master Layouts and if the two names (existing and merged) are identical, they will be considered identical by the program, and the existing ones and their settings will be kept, with data in the merged Layout Book lost. You may avoid this by renaming all those Attributes/Master Layouts of the to-be-merged Layout Book which you wish to keep even after merging.

CategoryLayouting, CategorySetup