Flatten polyline arc erases entities out of view

[DoTheBIM]

I'm out of practice on AutoCAD as I've been in Revit for the last several years and microstation prior to that. So the last time I've used AutoCAD was about 12 years ago. I'm trying to prep some dwg's for importing to another program for tracing... which is proving to be tedious work. So I almost have it but it seems I have a hiccup. After finding an arc to polyline converter, I needed to have segments of the arcs (the program that these get imported to don't like arcs) So I found a tip on here that flatten will do the trick. and it does as long as the arcs are all with in view. If any of them are out side the viewable drawing area the get deleted. What's up with that. How far I'm zoomed in depends on how many segments flatten creates, If I zoom out to include all arcs, then I don't get enough segments. It's a catch 22. Any help out there?

[irneb]

The built in Flatten does nothing more than export to WMF and then import back. The WMFout only works with the current view. That's why you see this happen.

Are there lots of these polylines? Perhaps you should try searching for a lisp to convert the arc portions into approximated line segments - similar to what happens inside the Express tools' SuperHatch.

[DoTheBIM]

Lots? For me, yes. every door swing of a student housing project with 5 floors and 3 buildings. each floor a different drawing. I'll try a searching for lisp, Thanks for explaining what is happening with that flatten. Seems something similar happens with text explode too.

[irneb]

Sorry to hear about that. You're correct about the text explode also using the WMF method.

Anyhow, I've just done a google and come across this: http://paracadd.com/lisp/plxl.lsp

Though that's quite old and would probably only work on Heavyweight Polylines. You can convert to-and-fro using the Convert command though.