I need to make fiddly official drawing files of my Front Panel Express panels. No problem, Front Panel Express exports to DXF. I can open the DXF file in DoubleCAD just fine. Just select all, paste into a drawing border in paper space in a drawing file and done, right?
Unfortunately not. The result looks fine, but after saving and reopening, all holes and standoffs on the panel come up painfully rendered with thousands of cross hatches apparently an attempt to show the holes' depth. It seems that Front Panel Designer exported the front panel as 3D DXF which is admirable but for some reason when I paste those 3D objects into my flat drawing in DoubleCAD, DoubleCAD it wants to do something special for me.
No problem, just flatten the DXF from Front Panel Designer, right? No, for some reason DoubleCAD XT 5 doesn't have the "FLATTEN" command like AutoCAD does. On the TurboCAD forums this feature is frequently requested, and although TurboCAD, DoubleCAD's parent company, gives the illusion at least of being a lot more sensitive to their customers than say EagleCAD, there is still no Flatten command. So customers post their favorite workarounds in the forums. There may be some trick to using the "place on workspace" command, but most workarounds that I've found so far involve editing the panel in Model Space, which is 3D, exploding all blocks, selecting everything and doing a cutclip and then pasting into paper space which supposedly flattens the exploded objects.
Sometimes this doesn't always work they way I expect however. Sometimes when I think I've flattened the model, I save it and reopen it and it shows the depth rendering still. My present theory is that I need to use the "explode" command several times. The last time I got it to work, the process seemed to be that I selected everything, used explode several times (which can only be done in Model space), then manually set the SizeZ for the entire group to 0, then cut everything and pasted it into Paper space and then back into Model space to verify that SizeZ stays 0, then saved and reopened to verify that SizeZ was still 0 and there was no extra rendering.
Here are a couple of forum threads where folks suggest their methods for flattening drawings. Many writers seem to agree that using a third application, ProgeCAD, is the easiest answer but I really wanted something that would do the job entirely in DoubleCAD.
This thread mentions ProgeCAD, talks a lot about something called pick-point hatch which I don't understand, somebody proposed the cutting and pasting into Paper space to flatten, and somebody else mentioned needing to use explode first if there are 3D blocks. Manually setting Z=0 is also mentioned, also a different command to change the elevation although the command syntax is not clear: http://forums.doublecad.com/index.php?topic=446.0
Here is another forum thread where setting Z=0 is mentioned, although it also mentions using the "place on workplane" command after that which never seemed to help me. ProgeCAD is also mentioned: http://forums.doublecad.com/index.php?topic=684.0
Here's how to do it in AutoCAD: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/How-to-flatten-a-drawing-so-all-linework-is-at-an-elevation-of-0.html
