In my youth, I used to build plastic models and many of my earliest endeavors were kits on the low end of the budget. This meant that many were imports from other countries where English was not the native language. Often, the instructions left a lot to be desired as the translated instructions used strange sequences of words to explain a simple task. Occasionally, you may encounter a similar instruction with some modern piece of electronics.
Well, some of the instructions in the Open Roads help seem to be suffering from similar translation issues. This excerpt is from the Match Feature Definition help-:
Equip the Element Selection tool then left-click on the element to which you wish to give a feature definition. (Translation: Use the Element Selector tool to select the element to be assigned a feature definition.
I do realize that sometimes, even English speaking countries use very different phrases to say the same thing.
Anyway, on the prompt side, the prompts for the Match Feature Definition tool remind me of some of the prompts in AutoCAD. The one command that always leaves me guessing is their Trim/Extend command. The current version might have improved the prompts, but for a long time, it was never clear which you selected first - the trimming element or the element to trim and once you made selections, the points required to complete the command were equally confusing.
As it turns out, to use this command, a feature definition must already be assigned to the element. I needed to use the Set Feature Definition to get my desired results. I was hoping for a match and set, kind of like the match and set attributes MicroStation Command. This is also not clearly explained in the help.