Three minutes later, Hank replied: “It’s beautiful. I’m calculating cut/fill now. You saved the day.”
But there was one final problem: the QGIS had exported in meters (the KML’s native units), but Hank’s civil plans were in US survey feet. If she sent this, every distance would be off by a factor of 3.28.
She looked at the KML file still sitting on her desktop. It was a reminder that in the world of digital design, the file extension is never the whole story. Opening a KML in AutoCAD wasn't a command. It was a quest. And like any good quest, it required sacrifice, knowledge, and the quiet, stubborn refusal to believe that a polygon was just a bunch of lines.
She emailed it to Hank with a single line: “Closed polylines. Feet. Layers preserved. Go.”