Question

Text Justification DGN after export from sde

  • 7 December 2022
  • 4 replies
  • 10 views

Hi,

hopefully someone had the same problem before and could help me.

I'm trying to export annotations and features from ArcGIS sde connection to Microstation dgn. However, the justification of the text are slightly shifted to the right, compared to the original text (see picture below).

 

picI've tried many things with DGNStyler and also the attribute igds_justification. None of these helped. It seemed like the calculated origin point is always slightly right. Last but not least, I also extracted x and y of the extent of original annotations and set that to the exported features. But it seemed FME still calculated an insertion point (see https://community.safe.com/s/article/text-justification) when exporting to DGN, so that there is a shift.

After that, I thought of calculating the centroid of the original bounding box and set that as igds_insertion_x and igds_insertion_y, but that didn't changed anything.

pic4pic3pic2Does someone know how to deactivitate the automated calculation of origin point. Or is it even possible to solve those shift problems?

I'm thankful for any hint.


4 replies

Badge +11

Hi @mylktea21​,

I would have also suspected igds_justification to be the solution but that doesn't seem to be working from what you've described. Unfortunately the insertion attributes are read-only attributes so that part won't work either.

 

I've seen some funny things with text justification so here are some things I would check:

  • Does the textstring have any leading or trailing spaces or invisible characters? The AttributeTrimmer may help here, or viewing it in the Editor in FME and enabling the filter to 'Show invisible characters like tab, spaces, newline'. Check this just before writing as sometimes a workflow can introduce some new factors
  • Is this text multiline?
  • Does this text have an annotation style and is it being honoured? If you are using an annotation style, consider setting the original file as a seed file if you haven't already
  • How does the igds_text_width_multiplier value compare between the original dgn and the new one?

 

Since the shift is about one character, I suspect it's either something with the textstring or some kind of conversion between arcgis font/size to dgn. A great starting point may be to just compare the properties of this text between the original and new dgn files. Hopefully that provides some ideas!

Userlevel 3
Badge +12

Hi,

 

I am facing the same problem. When I choose Justification = Left Center, the initial insertion point is respected. But for all other Justification options, the insertion point is shifted in the output DGN.

 

E.g.:

Justification = Center-Center => insertion point is shifted in X-direction (approx. half of the width of the label extents).

 

Jasper

 

 

Userlevel 3
Badge +12

Looking at the last part of Lena's answer on this forum post, offsets look inevitable

Badge +11

Hi @mylktea21​,

Our development team has recently made some improvements to the DGN reader and writer for FME 2024.0 with the new build available in our betas here: https://engage.safe.com/support/downloads/#beta

 

This is enhancement has a limited scope where the output is still very dependent on the seed file and what fonts are available on each individual machine. There are more enhancement plans targeted in the future but this will hopefully improve the experience of use cases like this one.

 

If this is something you might be interested in checking out, please give FME 2024 a spin and let us know your feedback on it.

 

FYI @Jasper Wisbecq​.

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