What’s New

TPC Desktop 2018

January 2018

• XReferences
  • TPC now supports CAD Xrefs
  • Reference a CAD XRef to your survey – n a perfect world, everyone works on your survey grid. In an imperfect world, they don’t. So you can scramble at the last minute to get the right coordinates or figure out how to change the ones you’ve got, or you can simply reference the XReference CAD file to your survey.
  • XRef layers – We’ve added some great tools to help you locate just what you need.
  • Xrefs – bind, unload, reload –
• New leader types
  • Curved – You can now draw Curved leaders in addition to angled leaders.
  • Dot – You can now end your leaders with a solid dot (circle) along with arrows and the other leader ends.
• Drawing View
  • Polyline areas – You can now compute the area of a drawing polyline from its Properties dialog.
  • Rotating an object to bearing – Right click an object and choose Modify Objects | Rotate to Bearing to start the new rotate command.
  • Drawing View Undo – Any changes made to Traverse Drawing settings can now be undone.
  • Almost Black/White – We added two new colors you can use as Black or White backgrounds for fills or clearing, without defaulting to CAD’s White = Black convention.
  • Blockreference background clearing – You can now clear individual block references by turning on [x] Clear Background in their Properties dialog.
  • Move Not Allowed – Tired of seeing the Move Not Allowed when you accidentally bump a traverse object like a line or a point symbol? Well, now you can go to the Program Settings and turn that message off.
  • Table and Legend item Line Spacing – You can now enter decimal line space factors. Add more line spacing to make the table easier to read or squeeze the lines together to fit more lines in.
• Drawing Templates
  • When you add a drawing template to an existing drawing, TPC used to remove any survey space objects from a layer in the current drawing if the template included that layer.
• CAD
  • When exporting a surface from a drawing to a CAD file, TPC turns off the polyfacemesh layer.
  • Contour labels are now embedded into the contour lines when TPC exports a drawing to a CAD file.
  • Drafted lines like –[GAS]– are now written to the legend when TPC exports a drawing to a CAD file.
  • Anonymous blocks – We added support for Anonymous blocks when importing a DWG file.
• CAD View
  • Send selected entities a group – select entities in the CAD View then right click and choose Drawing View | Send selected entities as group. All the entities selected will be sent over to the Drawing View as a group.
  • Send selected entities layers – entities from the unique layers of the currently selected entities will be sent to the Drawing View using the new Send selected entities’ layers command.
  • Convert to survey – Converts the selected entities to survey space. If you have multiple objects selected you’ll be asked if you want to create a traverse for each object.
  • Isolate a layer – The CAD View layer dialog now allows you to isolate a layer. The CAD drawing will automatically update to display only the isolated layer, until the layer is restored.
  • Entity properties – Select then right click any entity in the CAD View and choose Properties to display a dialog for that entity.
• Drawing Data Manager
  • Delineate drawing objects from Drawing Data Manager.
  • Delete unused blocks from a drawing.
• Closure View
  • [Warnings] section – The Closure View now includes a [Warnings] section you can turn on or off like you to the other sub-sections in the view. Just select View, Include Closure Data.
• GIS
  • Importing geographic (llh) shapes – If your geographic shape files doesn’t come with a projection file, TPC asks if you want to read it as geographic positions using the CRS of the survey.
  • GIS layers – When you import GIS objects into a drawing, TPC now adds them to the drawing’s current layer. Just select the layer you want as the current layer for the drawing, then import your GIS file.
• COGO
  • Tangent intersects – Tangent intersects are regular intersections with the added constraint that they must be tangent to some arc, curve or circle. In surveying, we run into these when do don’t have a starting bearing to work with.
• Exporting Surfaces to CAD
  • The polyfacemesh layer is turned off by default. You can simply turn it back on if you want to see it.
  • Contours with labels are now drawn as polylines, just like they are if labels are not included. Plus all contours and labels are set to their respective elevations.
• Point Codes
  • Label Formats (Lines, Curves, Points) are now stored with point codes.
• LandXML
  • Support LandXML hidden faces – Now when you import a LandXML surface, TPC honors the invisible faces. They don’t show up in the TIN, volume or slope computations and contours don’t extend into them.
• Traverse View
  • Now you can select all the points of a certain type in a traverse.
  • Edit multiple traverse points – And once you selected the points you want, enter one value for distance, bearing, elevation, etc. and all the selected points get updated.
  • Traverse Reports – Temporary Traverse Reports can now be saved as new reports.
• Task manager
  • You can now format the Tasks Manager by choosing Format View… F9 or pressing the F9 key.
• Import / Export
  • We added some new data types to the Generic Raw Data CSV filter – V – Vertical distance, y – Latitude, x – Longitude and z – Ellipse Ht
  • Support Carlson RW5 BP and GPS records
  • Option to set elevations to zero on import
  • Draw control point chain – TPC now provides an optional way to look at your control point chain.

TPC Desktop 2018 R1

April 2018

• Phrase driven legal descriptions
  • You create Legal Description Styles you can reuse as needed, to get just the style of legal description required.
• Crows feet
  • Crows feet work a lot like leaders in TPC. You can turn them on in the Traverse Drawing Settings or add them manually to object labels.
• Surfaces
  • Surface exclusions – Select a traverse and TPC will exclude all the surface triangles within it.
  • Polyfacemesh Layer – You can create unique layer names for a surface, so you can do things like, put the major contours of the Existing Grade on the EG-Major layer and the major contours of the Finished Grade on the FG-Major layer.
• Drawings
  • Multi-line curve and spiral labels
  • Prioritized Traverse Drawing Settings – a traverse takes control of all it’s own lines, line labels, point symbols and point labels, even if another traverse has already drawn them.
• AutoCAD 2018 support
  • We added support for AutoCAD 2018 DWG, DXF and Binary DXF files so you can read and write the latest files.

TPC Desktop 2018 R2

Sept 2018

• GIS
  • .prj files – TPC can now use GIS .prj files as the Coordinate Reference System for your survey.
  • SpatialReference.org – Now you can access projection sources, like SpatialReference.org, to find the projection you need. Export it as an ESRI prj file and you can use it in TPC.
  • Use the imported GIS projection as the survey’s CRS (Coordinate Reference System).
• Geodetics
  • We added a new warning when you try to compute geodetics with a local grid.
• Surfaces
  • You can now specify Minimum and Maximum elevations for contours. This lets you specify a single elevation for a FEMA elevation or restrict the contours to any elevation range.
  • We added one more range to the Slope Analysis for the City of Los Angeles. Now you have 6 ranges total, with the last one always being everything left above some slope.
• Drawings
  • New options to sort layers by drawing order in the Layers dialog
• Drawing Data Manager
  • Convert any drawing object to survey coordinates
  • More drag-n-drop for changing drawing order
  • New commands to delineate blocks and modified survey text
• XReferences
  • Now store parameters used to reference to survey
  • Lots more XRef data exposed – just expand an XRef node
  • Missing xrefs now show {xref filename}, just like missing pictures and blocks do
• Trimble DC Files
  • We expanded support for records like GPS Vectors, Ground Vectors, Stakeout Point Design, Point Grid Deltas, Long Feature Codes, Mean Turned Angles, Lines, Horizontal Arcs and Rounds MTA Residuals
• Import
  • Message view now tells how many points were imported
• New License System – you can now manage your own licenses on-line