I create a panel drawing in Stardraw, and safe it as a dxf. It is done in metric, preferences in mm, saved as a CAD 2005 .dxf, with 1 unit set to 1 mm.

When I insert the block in CAD is shows that the block units are in inches, and it has a factor of 25,4. This results in the block being 25,4 times larger than it should be. To overcome this I need to set the scale of the block to be inserted to a factor of 1/25,4. This results in the panel drawing being not that accurate as the required scale factor is infinite.

There must be a better way....

HP

Do you see the same issue if you save the drawing as .DWG?

if saved as a dwg the dimensions translate corectly.

It would be better to use dxf's or blocks, as this would allow to insert multiples into a single CAD drawing. However, this does not work anyway - see below.

Regardless of the dimensions associated with the dxf;

I save a s01 as a dxf, and if I insert the first block (dxf) it imports the complete drawing as done in Stardraw. If I then insert a second block (another dxf saved from another drawing in Stardraw) it only inserts parts of the drawing, with lot of items missing. It also fails to update the block, and uses the same block (or part of) as inserted first.

Further tries; I save my 2 different Stardraw panel drawings into dwg1 and dwg2, open both in Auto CAD, copy and paste dwg1 into the dwg2 - result is that the pasted object (dwg1) is the same as the object already in the dwg2! So this does not work either.

These 2 results are somewhat similar in that whatever is exported to AutoCAD does not allow combining from multiple s01 into a single dwg. I have found no way making this work. Somehow whatever is saved in Stardraw for AutoCAD (either dwg or dxf) is corrupt and not fully comatible.

Another example; when I export from Stardraw from a single s01 into AutoCAD the first time it works fine. When I then have to go back and revise my drawing in Stardraw, and export it again to AutoCAD, it will not correctly update. I save my updated s01 as a dxf, open my dwg, delete the block, insert the new updated block saved out from Stardraw (for which AutoCAD prompts me if I want to redefine the block - yes), but the updated block is the same as the old block and has not updated. Sometimes it is somewhere in between, but it is never correct. The only way I have found to make this work is by starting a completely new drawing in AutoCAD and insert the updated block. This is so annoying!

And back to my problem with multiple dxfs or dwg; I have found so far no way of combining multiple panel drawings s01 into as single drawing dwg! This is even more annoying, as I have to save each panel drawing as a separate dwg.

I seems to me there are serious compatability issues. BTW - I have AutoCAD 2002 and AutoCAD 2011. Exactly the same with both.

Cheers

I'm unable to reproduce the issue you describe, and don't understand why you think it's impossible to insert multiple DWGs into a single DWG.  Having saved 2 panels as 2 separate DWGs there is no problem inserting each/both into a drawing in AutoCAD (I am using AutoCAD 2010).

Likewise if I open the DWGs there is no problem copying and pasting either or both into other drawings in AutoCAD.

Perhaps there is a specific issue with the files you are creating.  Could you post the S01 files, and DWG files as a zipped attachment - we'd be happy to take a look.