TheSwamp
CAD Forums => Vertically Challenged => Land Lubber / Geographically Positioned => Topic started by: drizzt on November 04, 2010, 10:40:39 AM
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I am trying to get a dwt set up here at my office. At the same time I am learning to use Civil3D 2010. I have noticed that when I go to the settings tab, right click on the drawing name and then "edit label style defaults" and say, change the text height, only some of the styles in the drawing change, others do not.
I was expecting this to change all of the text created with styles to change, but they didn't. I suspect this has something to do with "child styles". Am I correct?
Wouldn't I want all my lable styles to change with this setting, so, If I need to change the standard text size, it does it with one setting, or am I just to hopefull?
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You mean to say that ALL of your labels use the same size text? If so, that's fine, but I have a number of different sizes...for instance my Existing labels use a smaller text size than the Proposed labels.
At any rate, those that change when you change the default are the ones that were using the default size in the first place. To reset all the sizes to be the same, click the arrow in the Child Override column, this will place a red X on it, when you OK out of the dialog all label styles will then use the desired text size. Note that you can do this in any level of the Styles hierarchy, so Surface styles can use a different value than pipes, Structures can use a value which differs from Points, etc.
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Thanks Jeff. I knew I remembered reading about Child overides somewhere, I just couldn't remember what it was.
My delima is I like my drawings that are produced on the smaller sheet sizes (11x17 and letter) to have a smaller text size. So I was looking for a quick way to change all the text height (and associated lines etc.) by a percentage or something like that.
Any one have a good process for doing this?
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I haven't been able to find one. As far as I've been able to ascertain, this aspect of appearance was not envisioned or taken into account in the design of C3D labels. The C3D labels kind of assume that a given label should always appear at the same printed height regardless of the paper size, unfortunately.
There may be something that custom programming can help with, but it's not a trivial task...
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I am so new to Civil3D I don't think i am ready for such a task.
Maybe I will create two different dwt's, one for larger size sheets and one for smaller size sheets.
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can't this be done by using some form of drawing scale Expression trick instead of specifying a set height?
or was that something I imagined?
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can't this be done by using some form of drawing scale Expression trick instead of specifying a set height?
or was that something I imagined?
Maybe. but wouldn't that be the same as going into each style and changing the text height. I mean I would have to add the expression to all the different styles right?
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can't this be done by using some form of drawing scale Expression trick instead of specifying a set height?
or was that something I imagined?
I think if you could somehow identify the Layout Page Size in an Expression, you could do that. It would be somewhat painful, because you would have to create the same sets of Expressions for every category of Label.
But I don't think there's any way to identify the Layout Page Size in an Expression, so it's kind of a moot point...
Annotative Text has no such option, either. But with that, you can sometimes "trick" the behavior by setting the Annotation and Viewport scales to different values.
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yeah....it seems like it creates as much work as it might save...
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if you want your 11x17 to have a smaller text, just plot it at a different scale (i.e. not 1:1). for example, if you want the text to reduce by 30%, just scale up your border and viewports by a factor of 1.42 (1/0.7) and then plot your window to fit. i would probably experiment with this to make sure your plotted paper is close enough in scale so when measuring with your ruler it's close enough.
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The problem with that is you would have to scale up your viewport scale by the same amount, to get things to appear the same. Same with your title block, and anything else in paperspace. But then you can run into issues with lineweights, and you may also want to use the "Scale Lineweights" option to get your layouts to look better, which means you need to build your title block with this in mind....
It can be done - I've used this technique. But it involves its own tribulations.
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i've never done it myself, just trying to think of alternatives.
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i've never done it myself, just trying to think of alternatives.
It does sound like it would work. I will do some experimenting
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close enough in scale so when measuring with your ruler it's close enough.
perfect...a 3d model reduced to 'close enough' there is something just not quite Jake here....
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You can scale it exact.
It's just a pain working in weird paperspace units, with text (and possibly lineweights) scaled-up so they print correctly at the weird paperspace unit settings.
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I would have thought so..however I can just imagine how weird it would be to get used to....SCALING paperspace at all
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close enough in scale so when measuring with your ruler it's close enough.
perfect...a 3d model reduced to 'close enough' there is something just not quite Jake here....
as soon as you print to paper, you've lost the model so i suppose just printing wouldn't be quite jake. besides, how close can you measure with your engineers scale? even plotting at a 10 scale, you would be hard pressed to measure a distance more accurately then 1/4 foot.
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close enough in scale so when measuring with your ruler it's close enough.
perfect...a 3d model reduced to 'close enough' there is something just not quite Jake here....
as soon as you print to paper, you've lost the model so i suppose just printing wouldn't be quite jake. besides, how close can you measure with your engineers scale? even plotting at a 10 scale, you would be hard pressed to measure a distance more accurately then 1/4 foot.
irrespective of how accurately one can measure the printed output
there is a difference between working within the inherent limitations of an output process, and creating the data in such a fashion that it is 'close enough' even before being output
and yes I know we tell folks all the time NOT to scale plans...and then they do...
and these days of actually loading the model into the survey/grading device pretty much eliminates most scaling from plans
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but the data isn't created "close enough". the data is spot on, the printed version of the data is "close enough". you don't export layout tabs to a machine control. the only thing the layout tabs are used for is plotting.
(just discovered some of the text formatting tools and smilies :-D)
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the model may be exact...however...the thing was some user indicated "it should be close enough" and they were discussing scaling paperspace
I'm not getting into the vagaries of how thick is the plotted line, what is the error of precision of the plotter, or how much creep there might be in the blue print....
Given that we are using CADD there shouldn't be any call for either the model OR the paperspace data to be 'close enough', I don't care how you plot it.
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dude, i'm the "some user" and again, the ONLY reason this came up is because we are plotting to paper. what does it matter if a paper replication of the model is off by 1/1000'?
again, it's a paper replication of the model, not the model itself! the cad is exact, the paper is different.
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It sounds to me like there's been some confusion in this thread between "scaling plans" as in "setting Autocad viewport and paperspace scales to appropriate values" vs. "measuring printed plans with a scale".
We can setup the viewport and paperspace scales EXACTLY. There's no reason to need an "approximation" there. So the only issue then is how accurately the printer can print. These days, in my experience, the vast majority of printers introduce negligible distortion, and you can use a scale on those plans just fine. Scaling off of a copy of a drawing tends to be worse, though, as I still see most scanners that distort the scanned image in one direction more than the other.
But we also get into another issue, that of "accuracy" vs. "precision". In this thread, the word "accuracy" has been repeatedly used when people are really talking about "precision". We can print out a very accurate plan set, but we are limited in how precisely we can measure that line by putting an engineer's scale up against that paper print.