Singing the ECW Blues

I had two cases this week regarding the ECW format. The cases were from the same customer and the users are working on the same project. This may have been the first time I've ever dealt with this raster image format.

Problem 1: "The ECW file disappears if I am in a view other than 'Top' or if the UCS changes in any way. "

 

The image really isn't disappearing; it is just slow to regenerate. First, flip flop between perspective and orthographic view in your active 3D viewport. This will jog civil 3D into displaying the ECW. Type PERSPECTIVE at the command line; 0 means orthographic, 1 means perspective.

However, you need to be patient. The image is there, but it may be painfully slow. ECW is a "lossy" format, which means it can achieve much higher image compression than say, a SID. In AutoCAD Civil 3D or Map 3D, every time you pan, zoom or change UCS, AutoCAD needs to regenerate the file. The file is constantly getting re-uncompressed, because the uncompressed ECW would be WAY too large for AutoCAD to handle.

Problem 2: "ECW moves in paperspace."

This Week In Support: Printing!

This week has been full of surprising discoveries for me. AutoCAD (and Civil 3D) is a never-ending adventure in tricks, cool stuff and sometimes WTF. I'm convinced that there is nobody on the planet who knows every single feature and variable.

AutoCAD Printing Issue #1:

The first thing I discovered is that the DWG to PDF.pc3 file from earlier versions of AutoCAD is not compatible with AutoCAD 2016. Here's the KB article on it. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to find that this was the root cause for an issue one of my guys was having.

In the case I had this week, the error was manifesting itself in an unexpected way. The user was able to publish to PDF only if each page was going to a separate file. It wouldn't create a multi-page PDF. The pre-2016 pc3 file shouldn't have worked even that much! In theory, it should always give the user a "Device not found" error.

http://autode.sk/24DcsnG
You'll need to update your 2016 page setups accordingly.

AutoCAD Printing Issue #2: