Topic: child styles

[drizzt]

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?

[Jeff_M]

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.

[drizzt]

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?

[sinc]

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...

[drizzt]

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.

[mjfarrell]

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?

[drizzt]

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?

[sinc]

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.

[mjfarrell]

yeah....it seems like it creates as much work as it might save...

[reno]

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.

[sinc]

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.

[reno]

i've never done it myself, just trying to think of alternatives.

[drizzt]

i've never done it myself, just trying to think of alternatives.

It does sound like it would work. I will do some experimenting

[mjfarrell]

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....

[sinc]

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.