Splines to Plines
Comments by: Odin Cary

I got caught with this problem when I had a group of people trace complicated forms from maps. Since splines lend themselves so well to organic forms, they were the natural choice for any novice user, but when I had to fill the outlines with "Bhatch" and also take area calculations, I found that I couldn't do it.

I am not certain about the limitations of Splines nor have I personally had much trouble with them, but novice users can do the most amazing things. One obvious mistake would be to stop a Spline curve and then attempt to restart it by continuing on from the previous point. Splines cannot be "Joined" like Plines and thus the curve cannot be closed; this means that the "Area" command and "Bhatch" may crash or simply fail. Since you cannot explode a Spline, what is left.

You can either Wblock (Export to DWG) the problematic Splines, call that new file up and "Save As..." an "AutoCAD R12/L2 Drawing (*.dwg)", re-insert into the current drawing and explode OR "Save As..." an "AutoCAD R12/L2 Drawing (*.dwg)" directly, exit without saving and re-open. The latter method may cause some conversion problems with other object types, so I recommend the former.