Drawing Surveys

I have recently purchased Autosketch 8. I have read the manual and I am having some problems. I need to draw parcels of land based upon legal discriptions. These include lines using bearings (ie N80 54' 64"S-250 Feet) and curves using radius, delta, arc length and chord bearings. I have figured out how to draw the lines using the line edit feature. I can not figure out how to draw the curves. Also, I will need to transform everything to a polyline to calculate areas and fill areas. Is this possible with this program or should I return it for a different program. Any help you could give me would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, Todd

 

Trim join command will do this.

 

It's fairly straight forward; click to start a multi-line, hit "r" and type in the relative position of the next point (x,y or polar from the System drop down.)
For curves, I would just put the end points in, offset the straight line by whatever curvature and then put a 3 point curve in -snapping to the end points of the origional line and the mid point of the offset one. Delete the two excess lines and use "TrimJoin" working round the shape untill it's an "Irregular Polygon".

I can Query the shape to give a parimiter, but no area.... wonder if I'm doing something wrong? {doh - working in mm and area is set to m}