How to draw a simple arc if you know the chord & Radius?

It seamed so easy to do this in AutoCAD, but I can't figure out how to
do it
with microstation. Often I need to draw an arc of which I know the
chord
length and the radius. With acad I could quickly do that by first
drawing
a horizontal line equal to the chord length and then simply drawing the
arc
by inputting the two end points and the radius length. With
Microsation
you can't select end points in that same manner. You can draw using
edge
instead of center method but that does not help me either (it to
difficult
to explain with out a picture). With the edge method then I need to
know
the versine distance (which I don't know). Thanks

 

Well, perhaps you don't know enough about Microstation. First of all,
if you draw the line, and then draw an arc in edge mode and check the
radius box and tell it the radius, you can snap to the end points and
the behavior will be as requested.

An alternative is to use Accudraw in Distance/Angle mode rather than
just X/Y mode (although X/Y mode will work as long as you stick to one
axis). Once you select to draw an Arc using edge mode, tick the check
box for radius then click your arc starting point. Then, enter your
chord distance into Accudraw, and click again. Voila, you have an arc
with the correct chord. The advantage of using the accudraw method is
that you can go ahead and give the chord the correct direction by
putting that in the angle entry of accudraw. If you don't know how to
use accudraw, in V8, turn it on by clicking on the "axis tick marks"
button on the Primary tool bar. In Microstation J, click on the "T
square / triangle" button on the Primary tool bar.

If you still can't get it to work, post back and maybe I can help you a
little more.

Sincerely,
Matthew Simmons

 

Thanks, that works great. To add to that question, is there a way
to
specify the radius buy snapping to the end point of an existing line,
as
opposed to typing in radius "104.1534" ? tx