Some programs and/or add-ons to AutoCAD - such as Land Development Desktop, or Civil 3D - have the ability to draw contours and other objects using special entities that are specific to that program, which MSCAD can not work with completely.
MSCAD 2001/2002/2004 (Based on the FelixCAD engine)
MSCAD 2004 and previous does not have an equivalent for these special entity types, so we can not read them in. We suggest you ask your source to generate the contours as normal polylines instead, or to explode the contours into standard CAD entities such as lines or polylines, and then we can then read them in just fine.
MSCAD 2005/2008 (Based on the IntelliCAD engine)
When you open a drawing with these special entities in MSCAD 2005 or newer, you will see a message at the command line informing you that "This drawing contains one or more proxy entities. These entities WILL be stored and saved back to the drawing."
Because they are not standard CAD entities such as lines or polylines, they do not exist on any specific layers and they can not be modified in any way, and also they can neither be selected nor snapped to for use by any other commands. The only control MSCAD has over these "proxy entities" is to hide or show them. To do this, type the command PROXYSHOW at your command line, and set it to 0 to hide them or 1 to show them. You may then need to issue a REGEN command. PROXYSHOW is an all-or-nothing command, you can not selectively display only some of these entities. If the PROXYSHOW value is set to 1 to show them, then they will both display on your screen and they will plot like any other entity.
If you need to do more than just display/plot them, then we suggest you ask your source to generate these entities as normal lines or polylines instead, or to explode them into standard CAD entities such as lines or polylines.
Jason Poitras
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