Creating Lot Notes Label Style with Reference Text in Civil 3D

Creating Lot Notes Label Style with Reference Text in Civil 3D - Exploring the Use of Reference Text in Label Styles

Discover how to create a note style using a feature called reference text in a professional design software. This tutorial provides a step-by-step guide to achieve this, creating labels and text components, and modifying their layout and visibility settings.

Key Insights

  • The tutorial includes creating a note style by introducing labels and text components such as 'lot number' and 'assessor's parcel number'. This was accomplished by adjusting different settings under the general and layout tabs.
  • Modifications were made to the position, orientation, and visibility of components for better organization. Also, a reference text was added to the note that can refer to different objects within the software, such as COGO points, parcels, profiles, surfaces, and survey figures.
  • Finally, the settings for 'drag state' were adjusted for better user interaction. It was emphasized that the objects need to be in the drawing for you to be able to reference them, thus external references cannot be used for this purpose.

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In this video we're going to go ahead and create another note style, but this time we're going to be using a feature called reference text. So what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to go back into our general, we're going to go back into label styles, we're going to go back to note, I'm going to right click and select new.

So inside of here we're going to go to our information tab and I'm going to go ahead and call this lot notes. So from here, we're going to go to the general tab. Again, textile label visibility layer.

I'm going to go ahead and change my layer to see Anno. I'm going to go ahead and click. Okay.

Then I'm going to leave my object orientation. I'm going to leave my none forced insertion. I'm going to leave my plan readability is true.

110 and false. I'm going to go ahead and go to layout. I'm going to go ahead and change some of the information.

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I'm going to turn off my border visibility. Um, I'm going to go ahead and go up to my contents. I'm going to go ahead and go in here to notes.

And I am going to change this note to lot colon space pound. When we go ahead and place this label, I'll know that I want to put a specific lot number into this label here. So from here, I'm going to go ahead and actually, I'm going to modify this because I like to have caps for my notes.

So I'm going to go ahead and type it in all caps lot. I'm going to go ahead and zoom out a little bit on this so that I can see the text that I'm placing. I'm going to go ahead and add a new text component.

So the first thing I want to do is change this to lot right here for my name, for this text component, I'm going to go ahead and add in a new text component. I'm going to change this to APN for assessor's assessor's parcel number. I'm going to go ahead and change my label text to read APN colon space pound so that I know to put in an APN number when I place these labels.

Now I have to go ahead and change the information on my offsets. So I don't want to change my X offset because I want these labels to stack on top of each other, but I do want to change my Y offset. I want APN to show below lot.

And I know that my text height was 0.1. So I'm going to go ahead and type negative 0.1 here for my Y offset and hit ENTER. You'll notice the text stacks right underneath. Now I probably want to have a space between the two pieces of text.

So I'm actually going to need to go maybe a half of a text height between these two. So I'm changing this to negative 0.15. I'm going to hit ENTER. And this looks pretty good to me.

So I like how this looks right now. So I'm going to leave it as is. The one thing I am going to go ahead and do is change my attachment.

I'm going to change my attachment to top left so that when I go in here and I go to lot, I'm going to go ahead and change this to top left. And so what you're going to see is that everything is going to be oriented to the left-hand side. So all this text will be placed going to the right instead of being centered.

So moving on from here, we have lot, we have APN. I'm going to go ahead and add in a new piece of information, which is a reference text. So inside of these notes, you can add text lines and blocks.

You can also add ticks like you're used to seeing inside of an alignment. But this new piece of information, which is reference text, is something that we're going to go ahead and place now. I'm going to select reference text.

I'm going to go ahead and reference from a specific object inside Civil 3D. So these notes labels can look to different objects rather than like a surface label that would only look to surfaces. This label can look to COGO points, parcels, profiles, surfaces, and survey figures and alignments.

So based on what you want to reference, you would select the object that you want to reference to. The only important thing to note about these labels is that the object has to be in your drawing for you to be able to reference it. If you have something XREFed into your drawing, you cannot reference that because that object is not live into your drawing.

We're going to go ahead and go with surface. I'm going to go ahead and click OK. And then from here, I'm going to go to contents for my reference text.

I'm going to click on here. I'm going to drop down. I'm going to click on surface elevation.

I am going to go to highlight label text. I'm going to type in Pad L space, and then I'm going to choose my surface elevation. I'm going to be feet, 0.01, rounding normal, period, comma, digital grouping.

I'm going to leave all these the same and click the arrow to make the text come across. So I'm going to click over here. Now what I should be getting is pad elevation is this information.

And I know that we're going to be working in feet. So I'm going to go ahead and add a foot marker at the end. I'm going to click OK.

Then what I'm going to go ahead and do is make sure that these question marks are showing up where I want them to be. So these question marks are the reference text. I'm going to go ahead and change my name for my reference text to Pad L. And I'm going to go ahead and change my attachment to top left, just like the other two.

But this time I'm going to change my Y offset to be two heights of text plus two halves. So I'm going to go ahead and be three. So 0.3 below and hit apply.

I didn't do negative. I did positive. So it moved up.

So I have to do negative 0.3, hit apply, and then hit OK. So I'm going to make sure that my attachment is correct. So anchor component is feature, feature, feature.

So these are showing up correct. The anchor point here is middle center, top left, top left. So I want to go ahead and try and make sure that I have this set to top left.

Now everything should be good. Let's go ahead and make sure that I have everything set here, top left, top left. I do have this here, top center.

So let's go ahead and try a top left. There's my question marks navigating over to the spot that I expected them to be. So I thought something looked a little off.

I just had to go through all of my settings here to make sure that this is appearing as I want it to be here. Now that we have this, I'm going to go ahead and go to drag state again. I don't intend to have a drag state for this, but if I did, I want to make sure it's set up correctly.

So I'm going to go ahead and go to a spline leader again. And this time, I'm going to go ahead, instead of doing dot, I am going to go ahead and go with integral. So I'm going to go ahead and choose that.

I'm going to hit apply and hit OK. Now that I have this lot notes label style set up, I'm going to go ahead and minimize these. And then I'm going to go ahead and save.

And then I'll meet you in the next video.

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
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