Help with Shapefile export

[dlh340951]

I am a basic Autocad user, by this I mean, I am self taught and know how to do what I need to which is pretty basic stuff. So please... Be gentle. Ok, a "government agency" is requiring me to submit info to them in shapefile format. Their wording.. ".... should be represented as a closed, non-overlapping polygon with the associated feature attributes...." Supposedly, there is a .prj file associated with this. In just playing around, the MapExport command can generate a .shp, but I am curious to know where does this .prj come into play and what do you think they mean by "... use an unprojected WGS84 coordinate system..." and have minimum horizontal accuracy of +/- 40 feet conforming to 1:24K national mapping standards. I do set up a WGS84 system when I bring in my county provided maps and everything is laid out to 5280 units is a mile. So I dont bug anyone to death, is there somewhere I can go and learn how to do .shp file generation and this .prj attachment??

[Ed Jobe]

Sounds like you have everything you need. Just do the export. It will create a folder with several files in it. A "shape file" is really several files, prj (the projection) being one of them.

[dlh340951]

Ok, that sounds great, maybe I was making a mountain of a molehill.

[dlh340951]

I think I have it figured out best I can. Yes, I set up coordinate system in new drawing and use a copyclip to bring in what I want from a pre-generated map. When do a map export, make sure I use the polygon selection. (this now shows me NAD83 in the options tab for the coords.) Selecting the polygon also creates the .prj file. I also found out that if you want all objects saved, not just lines, in the "save" box where you add your file name, at the bottom you can select Shape Multiclass and all objects will be saved under various names. Some of the help areas point you toward the export drop down box and appending the file. I could not easily find where that was, but did find this. Also noticed that text is not saved as readable text, just dots. Dont know how to fix that, but I found what I needed. Thanks Ed.

[Jmurphy]

Ah come on the gov't is not that hard to get along with, most of the agencies don't know what they want to start with and if wait long enough the person asking for it will forget or be in another position. (Yes I work for the Gov't) The text are exported as a point type and the text string is an attribute of the point. One thing you may want to make sure is when you export include the data of the objects. This can be the properties (layer, color, area, etc) or object data attached and attributes of any blocks exported.
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