I imported a surface to Manifold and created a contour drawing from the surface.

All looks good in Manifold but when I export it seems that the projection does not stick with the shp. If I reimport to Manifold all comes good.

Any ideas? The surface is in lat/long and I changed projection to UTM to extract the contour, if I export to kml all works good, the shp drawing only works fine in Manifold, really having a hard time to read the right projection outside Manifold.

May be someone experienced something like that and could give me some tips here.....

Make sure that the Local Scale X/Y are set to 1, and that the Local Offset X/Y are set to 0. Manifold "supports" this for any exported format by storing it in auxiliary XML, but the shapefile cannot store these values - and other software won't know about the XML. If you derive a drawing from a raster, or create one with a window open that uses non-default values then you need to reproject (Edit Projection, not Assign Projection) the drawing to use those default values before export.

Medeski, Martin & Wood

I have set the Local Scale X/Y to 1 and the Local Offset X/Y to 0 as well, I did that after importing the surface, actually the surface comes always in the right projection. With the surface already reprojected in UTM I extracted the contour.

Now... when I try to export the contour to a shape is that when does not work properly, may the issue is here, whit the contour already in UTM, should I change the Local Scale/Offset?

Also, try it without the projection file, if you haven't already done so.

tried that one as well...did not work....

Make sure that when you change the projection, you 'change projection' and do not re- 'assign' it.

Distributed Geospatial Solutions -- makers of AtlasAlive Geo-Hosting Framework (Check out version 3.9!) www.distributedgis.com

with the contour already in UTM, should I change the Local Scale/Offset?

Yes, you need to change projection of the contour drawing to have 1.0 local scales and 0.0 offsets. The surface will generally need these to have different values to work, and the contour will inherit those values.

I have set the Local Scale X/Y to 1 and the Local Offset X/Y to 0 as well, I did that after importing the surface,

If you did that to the surface, it was a mistake. Those parameters are necessary for any raster (image or surface) and should be left alone (unless of course you do want to change coordinate systems).

It is for drawings made from a raster that the parameters are problematic and should be reset.

(I'm not adding anything to what everyone else has said—I just wanted to point out the error suggested by the quote. If the projection of the surface is initially trashed then only more trash can come of it.)