She knew the enemy now: projection. Google Earth used WGS84, a geographic coordinate system based on latitude and longitude on a sphere. Her drawing was set to State Plane, a grid designed to minimize distortion over a small area. The KML had been flattened like a pancake, and all the juicy terrain data had squirted out the sides.
"I just showed AutoCAD how to speak Geography," she said. "It's all about the projection." autocad import kml
"Perfect," she muttered, slamming her coffee mug down. "He designed a resort for ants. On a tennis ball." She knew the enemy now: projection
It worked.
The KML—Keyhole Markup Language—was a creature of the sky. It lived in the curved, spherical world of Google Earth, where lines were drawn on a globe and "straight" was an illusion. AutoCAD lived on the flat, rational Cartesian plane of X and Y. Converting one to the other was like ironing a crumpled map of the world. Something always got stretched. The KML had been flattened like a pancake,