Bentley CADscript V8i

Publishing Quality Text Presentation

Text can be presented with drop shadows, linear graduated fill, and other classic desktop publishing methods. For example, users can automatically create drop shadows for text while customizing the color, offset, and angle. Text can be edited after placement without affecting the drop shadow applied.

Bentley CADscript also offers a suite of tools offering advanced support for the placement and manipulation of curved text. Text elements can be placed along, or parallel to, most MicroStation curve or shape elements—with the number of control points being specified—allowing the fit to be as rigorous, or as smooth, as desired. Text strings can be edited, and font style, size, slant, justification, and inter-character spacing are easily modified. As the curve defining the position of the string is stored with the string, the parameters can always be changed throughout the life of the drawing.

Color Gradient Capabilities

Bentley CADscript supports a variety of desktop publishing capabilities in MicroStation to allow users to create design effects. Graduated linear fill can be applied to any closed or text elements. The fill consists of a smooth variation in color from the defined start and end color. Any number of mid-point colors (distance definable by percentage) can be added to give the required color graduations. Radiated fill produces a graduated fill for closed elements, radiating from a designated start point to the furthermost point within the element. Users can also use the shade element tool to change the color or fill of an element to be a percentage of an existing color in the color table. Text elements can also be shaded.

The Bentley CADscript halo tool is used to create halo effects on either closed of linear elements. Bentley CADscript provides functionality to create a full halo or one-sided halo without the need to mask features. Full and one-sided halo tools create a graduation effect starting at one color or grey scale, and ending in another at a specified distance from an element. Halos can be used as design effects to represent water, earth or area boundaries such as parkland.

WYSIWYG Word Processing

Text entry time is substantially reduced and simplified with Bentley CADscript.  Bentley CADscript includes a true WYSIWYG word processor operating inside MicroStation. You can easily create formatted text inside DGN files, or import from word processors and spreadsheets. This is ideal for producing a higher quality of drawing notes, map legends, specifications, material lists, schedules and quantity lists. The word processing capabilities include a DGN spell checker, different text styles in the same sentence, control over tabs, indents, and borders and the ability to include cells in the text. Text can spill over to the next page to form columns. Flexible inset control can restrict text to be on certain areas of a page, allowing MicroStation graphics to be inserted in the space areas.

Cartographic Finishing

Bentley CADscript includes tools to aid in cartographic finishing, such as clipping behind text, filling areas independent of outlines, stroking elements interactively on the screen, converting curves to linestrings, and applying various types of line caps to elements in the DGN.

Bentley CADscript also includes the ability to import EPS files into MicroStation for later plotting through Bentley CADscript. If the EPS includes a TIFF header it will be displayed inside the DGN file. This feature enables montages to be built up with images from several other applications and combined easily and the use special graphics created in other desktop publishing tools.

A handy, flexible tool for building map indexes and references from DGN file text labels is included with Bentley CADscript. The user simply chooses the desired output format in coordinates, specifies the lower left and upper right point of the map, and the interactive process guides the user through creation of the map index.

Printing Control of Ordering, Symbology, and Masking

Ordering, symbology and masking are controlled through the table printing control dialog. It allows easy setup and navigation whilst retaining the familiar point and click interface. All elements can be ordered, symbolized and masked for the output without affecting the elements in the DGN file.

Bentley CADscript provides for table ordered printing or file ordered printing. Table ordered printing allows users to define a set of rules to order the elements when printing with Bentley CADscript. Table symbology also provides the ability to change the way elements display, both on screen and on print, without affecting the original data. The table masking feature is for enhancing legibility of overlapping elements such as contour labels over contours.

Print Press Ready Color Separations

Using Bentley CADscript, it is simple to produce a composite Postscript or color separation files for print production. Any color table can be used, however, Bentley CADscript provides users with a color table which makes it easier to select colors on a CMYK basis. Colors can also be nominated for separation as process colors, spot colors, sub-spots or registration colors.

Process colors will be automatically split into their CMYK components for four color plate production. A spot color will create another plate for a special solid color, and percentages of that color. Registration colors will print on all plates, and allow for custom registrations to client specifications. Screen angles can be defined for each plate and any color can be defined to knockout or overprint. Bentley CADscript also supports definition of bleed margins and the automatic output of registration bulls eyes and color registration bars.

High Performance Printing

A much used Bentley CADscript function is raster resampling during the printing process to improve the speed of generating an output. Providing increased printing speed, the pixel-averaging algorithm ensures a high quality output without changing the physical dimensions of the image. By resampling on-the-fly at time of print, the size of output is adjusted to the available resolution of the printer. Using resampling and compression, Bentley CADscript reduces the size of the print file to manageable proportions. It also allows users to set a maximum resolution that all images will be resampled to. 

Bentley CADscript also has a batch printing facility that allows for background processing of script files. The script files, known as Print Parameter Files (PPF), contain all information required to create specific Bentley CADscript prints without a user interface. Basic script files can be saved from the Bentley CADscript print control. The files are easily edited and configured to increase functionality such as printing scanned areas from a DGN file.

Reliable and Powerful Print Control

Bentley CADscript Print Control provides an easy to navigate interface making it straightforward to create high quality Industry Standard PostScript output. Bentley CADscript Print Control provides an easily navigated print interface. Easily define print setup, manage plot scale, implement image compression techniques, plot rotation and color separation options from one screen.

Bentley CADscript Print Control also provides an easy method of producing plots at a defined scale. Real world scale factors are used when printing with Bentley CADscript, rather than working unit/paper unit relationships. If desired, photo reduction scales the output in a similar manner that would be achieved photographically by a process camera. When a photo reduction factor is set, the output drawing will be scaled by the reduction factor. The difference between photo reduction and scaling is that line weights are reduced by the reduction factor, whereas normal changes in scale only affects the size of the elements.

Integration with Bentley MAPscript

Bentley CADscript can link directly to the Bentley MAPscript server. Bentley MAPscript is based on a server/client environment in which all processing is performed on the server. MAPscript is a queue based system. Queues can be directed to printers, plotters, and also to a range of file types including PDF, PNG, GEOTIFF, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, PostScript, B&W and Color RTL, B&W and Color PCL. MAPscript offers direct plotting of DGN and DWG files. It features an integrated cost accounting module and allows for remote administration. 

MAPscript is fully integrated with Bentley CADscript. Bentley CADscript is automatically configured as a MicroStation client to submit to all the available queues at the server. MAPscript offers a complete range of control, quality, and performance features. Advanced document finishing functions are also available directly from MAPscript, such as roll selection and paper folding using plotters that support these functions.