Creating a Custom Parcel Label Style for Area Labels

Creating a Custom Parcel Label Style for Area Perimeter Display

Gain an in-depth understanding of the process of creating label styles for parcel data in design-focused software. This comprehensive guide walks through the procedure, highlighting crucial elements such as creating a new label style, choosing specific information to display, defining text styles and visibility, and many more precise steps involved.

Key Insights

  • Creating a new label style involves selecting the development site, clicking on parcel properties, and venturing into the composition tab. Here, the area selection label style is chosen, and a new style can be created.
  • Defining the label's composition involves delving into the general tab, where the text style is selected, label visibility is set, and orientation referenced to the object. The layout tab is then used to decide the component, with options including name, description, parcel area, and more.
  • After establishing the label composition, the name is changed to match the displayed information. Additional parameters like text height, rotation angle, border visibility, and more are adjusted to preference. Post-tweaking, the new style can be saved and applied to the parcel data.

Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.

In the next two videos we're going to talk about label styles as it relates to parcels. In the first video we're going to talk about label styles for the area labels and then in the next video we'll talk about label styles for the parcel segments.

So, to talk about area label styles, what we're going to go ahead and do is select our development site 5. I'm going to go ahead and click on parcel properties again and I'm going to go ahead and go to the composition tab. So, inside the composition tab, I have the area selection label style and I have parcel name selected. So I can choose one of the options that we have available here, or I can go ahead and create new.

So, inside of 'Create New, ' we're going to start creating a new label style for this parcel here. What we have the information to be able to do is have a name. I don't know what the name is going to be yet because I haven't decided how I'm going to name my or what I'm going to display in my parcel yet.

So, I'm going to go ahead and go to my general tab. Inside the general tab, I have the text style. So, what is the text type that's going to display? I'm going to go ahead and go with standard label visibility, whether it's on or off. So, false is off, true is on.

I'm going to go ahead and create a label that will be displayed, so I'm going to leave label visibility as true. I'm going to leave it on layer zero. I have my orientation reference to the object.

Learn Civil 3D

  • Nationally accredited
  • Create your own portfolio
  • Free student software
  • Learn at your convenience
  • Authorized Autodesk training center

Learn More

I will not have it reference to view or world coordinate system. I'm going to go ahead and leave my plan readability as true. I'm going to have my readability bias as it is filled out currently as 110, and I'm going to have my flip anchors with text as false.

So, I'm going to go ahead and move on to the 'Layout' tab. From here, we have the information for what our component is going to be. I'm going to go ahead and go to my contents first so that I can figure out what my component is going to be, and I'm going to go ahead and go to the contents, click on the ellipses, and from here, I'm going to drop down my properties and see what I have available for my area label style.

So, I have the options of name, description, parcel area, parcel number, parcel perimeter, address, site name, style name, and tax ID. So, what I'm going to go ahead and do is assign my parcel perimeter. I'm going to do a parcel perimeter, and I am going to change this up by deleting 'area' and typing in 'perimeter.'

So, I'm going to go ahead and select 'perimeter, ' 'parcel perimeter, ' have 'perimeter:' selected, and then I'm going to make sure I pick with my cursor on the right side of the text that I just typed in. I'm going to choose my modifiers, which is foot, precision is set to 0.01, I'm going to do normal rounding, a decimal character period, a digital grouping symbol of comma, and a digital grouping of numeric with no comma delimiting or anything like that, negative sign, and then I'm going to go ahead and hit the arrow across. What happens is the data from my properties of parcel perimeter is now populated over here in this window next to my perimeter text.

So, I'm going to go ahead and click 'OK, ' and what you'll now see is that I have the name over the top of the perimeter and the perimeter distance.

Now, what I probably want to go ahead and do is I clicked on the ellipses here so that I know that I'm dealing in feet. I'm going to go ahead and add a little foot marker here so I can click okay, and now a little foot marker shows up after my definition of my text of the parcel perimeter in feet. From here, we have the options for what our name is.

We're going to go ahead and change it to 'perimeter' since we're displaying the perimeter. Visibility is true, anchor is the feature because this is the only piece of text that we have. If we had other text, we could anchor it to other pieces of text, and for now, we're going to do our anchor component to our feature.

Label location is our anchor point. Then we have the contents, which we already went through. Your text height, how it will appear scaled in model or in paper space.

So, a 0.1 inch height text. Then you have your rotation angle. You can specify a specific rotation angle that you want to have.

You have your attachment, so whether it's top left, top center, top right, middle left, middle center, middle right. I'm going to do no offsets, and then I'm going to go ahead and leave it as bilayer. Bilayer for line weight and 0 for max width.

I'm going to have my border visibility set to false. If I set it to true, you'll notice here that a box gets put around my text. So, I'm going to go ahead and leave it as false.

From here, you have your border information that you could select. Since I have false, I'm not going to bother changing any of this. If I wanted to add more text to my label, then I could, and I could go ahead and just drop down here, choose text.

I could add lines or blocks just like we discussed when we were talking about point label styles. So, I'm going to go ahead and just have my parcel information here, my perimeter information here. So, I'm going to go ahead and go to dragged state.

I don't intend on having a dragged state for my area labels, so I'm not going to do any work in here. But if I wanted to have a dragged state, you would have your leader information here, and then your dragged state component information here. So, your display, arrowhead style, size, visibility, type of leader, color of your leader, line weight, and line type here.

You have your display, your border visibility, your border type, masking, gaps, text height. We have our leader attachment where the leader attaches to our text, leader justification, color. We have our line type, line weight, and our text width.

So, moving on from there, I'm going to go to the summary, and inside the summary tab, it's just the summaries of the previous tabs. So, you can either go in here and change information or you can go into the individual tabs and change that information. So, what we're going to go ahead and do here is we're going to change our name of our style.

Since we're doing a style that gives us a perimeter, we're going to go ahead and say 'parcel name and perimeter.'

And what you'll see here now is that we have development site five perimeter 312.01. So, I'm going to go ahead and save my drawing and then I'll meet you in the next video where we'll talk about segment label styles.

photo of Michael Kinnear

Michael Kinnear

Civil 3D Instructor

Mike is a Civil Engineer and a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He brings a wealth of experience working on transportation engineering and site development projects that involve working with Civil 3D, AutoCAD, and MicroStation. Mike is an avid hiker and enjoys spending time with his family in the local Cuyamaca and Laguna mountains.

  • Autodesk Certified Instructor (ACI)
  • Autodesk Certified AutoCAD Civil 3D Professional
  • Civil 3D
More articles by Michael Kinnear

How to Learn Civil 3D

Master Civil 3D for infrastructure design, site development, and engineering projects.

Yelp Facebook LinkedIn YouTube Twitter Instagram