"It's on Google Earth," Mr. Verona had chirped over the phone. "I drew the trails, the lodge, and the helipad right on the satellite image. Just… put it into your CAD thing, okay?"
She emailed the DWG back to Mr. Verona. An hour later, her phone buzzed. autocad import kml
The first attempt was a massacre.
She looked at the blinking cursor, then at the serene perfection of the imported geometry on her screen. "It's on Google Earth," Mr
She knew the enemy now: projection. Google Earth used WGS84, a geographic coordinate system based on latitude and longitude on a sphere. Her drawing was set to State Plane, a grid designed to minimize distortion over a small area. The KML had been flattened like a pancake, and all the juicy terrain data had squirted out the sides. Just… put it into your CAD thing, okay
Then, she tried the import again, but this time she used and chose the KML as a source. A dialog box appeared—a wise, wrinkled old wizard compared to the brute force of before. She told AutoCAD to use the current geographic coordinate system. She told it to interpret lines as polylines and polygons as closed boundaries.
The KML—Keyhole Markup Language—was a creature of the sky. It lived in the curved, spherical world of Google Earth, where lines were drawn on a globe and "straight" was an illusion. AutoCAD lived on the flat, rational Cartesian plane of X and Y. Converting one to the other was like ironing a crumpled map of the world. Something always got stretched.