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Editor's Note: Ask Inga is our new monthly column for newer MicroStation users. Author Inga Morozoff has more than 15 years of experience using MicroStation, including 12 as a production operator in the petroleum industry. She is now a MicroStation Institute instructor and a member of the technical support staff at Bentley Integrator WorkPlace Wisdom Inc.,
of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and is a popular contributor to the USENET newsgroup comp.cad.microstation. You may write Inga Morozoff with your MicroStation questions at [email protected] for use in a future column,
Dear Inga: I'm a self-taught user who just can't seem to figure out drawing units. If I want to draw a chemical plant in Metric, what do I put the settings to? what about being able to convert my drawings to imperial later? Thanks for any help on this frustrating topic!
-Susan G. United Kingdom
Dear Susan: If you think of your MicroStation design file as a huge sheet of "grid" paper, you'll actually find it very easy to understand working units. First, you need to know that the design file in 2D is a design plane with a fixed size of 4,294,967,296 units or "positional units" along both the X- and Y-axis.
In 31), the file is a design cube; the Z-axis has the same number of positional units as the X andY.