Ok, so if between you, me and jason we have this whole Civil3D topology thing licked, why arent we writing AOTC parcels right this second? We need to before we give away all of our secrets.
Here is the deal on the data shortcuts.
Fine. Cool. Rework your entire workflow and the comapny workflow, i am all for tha.
But guys like Dinosaur are lone wolves. The boss says- try it. If you fail, its done. is over. no room to shift that paradigm later. These guys need a solution now. Once they get in, they do a project, their eyes open and see possibilities.
Secondly, do you know how many phone calls, emails, requests and otherwise I get PER DAY about stuff like this? people who are knee deep in projects. People who are cadautl clients but maybe didnt get training. or maybe got training but for some reason still went back into an old drawing and didnt move it forward to a Civil 3D template.
They are googling, questioning and calling because they need a solution now. What am I supposed to tell them? "Rework you workflow. Install vault andstart over?"
No freaking way.
If i give them that line they will miss their deadline get pissed at me and autodesk, go back to land desktop and tell me later what a crock of crap civil 3d was cause they couldnt change their label size.
these are firms that current manage to sets of land desktop labeling or dtext anyway. their layer states are already established (whether officially or "in their heads") to accomodate different text sizes in differnt plats. or maybe they label in paperspace to avoid all confusion on scale all together.
THIS is what I am upagainst. I can't hide from it and I won't say you cant use ciivl 3d if you dont change everything. that's not gonna happen.
in my personal work, where i work over spotty VPNs, FTPs and other not so tight data sharing situations I would rather hand over a baseplan that can be xrefed into many sheet families and a CAD tech can just zip through and change layer states than try to wrestle with vault over distance.
So sure. Ideally, and eventually, change your whole workflow. But for now, who gives a crap? Just label the damn line and get back to work.
And this is why the James, Nick, Jason and Dana show is so entertaining. Consider the can of worms opened.