Discover the intricacies of label styles and their utilization in Civil 3D. This article delves deeply into various label styles, their components, and the specific data each can yield from an alignment.
Key Insights
- The label styles in Civil 3D are versatile and come in a variety of types such as station offset, line, curve, spirals, tangent intersections, and point of intersections. Each style has its unique features and is used for different kinds of labels on the drawing.
- Editing label styles offers a wealth of information. For instance, a station offset label style can provide data like offsets, station offset side, station value, raw station, station equation ID, and more. This information can be crucial for presenting data in design drawings.
- Managing labels in Civil 3D may initially seem time-consuming, but once set up, label styles greatly enhance workflow efficiency in design processes. The ability to customize label styles to suit specific project requirements contributes to this efficiency.
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Now that we've placed all of our alignment labels, we're going to go ahead and talk about the label styles for these alignment labels. We're going to navigate over to the settings tab of our tool space.
We're going to go to alignments, we're going to go to label styles, and then we're going to look at some of these label styles that we have in here. So you'll notice that we have a lot more label styles than we do have current types of labels that we could put on the drawing, and that's because we have different label styles for the components from the segments types of labels. We have line, curve, and spirals, then we have our tangent intersections and our point of intersections, and then we have our station offset and stations label styles.
We're going to go ahead and go to our station offset label styles. We're going to go to our station offset label style that we're using in current drawing, and we're going to go ahead and right click and select edit. So inside of here, we have the information tab.
Again, name, description, who created it. We have the general tab, which again is the same as any kind of label style you're going to see in Civil 3D. Textile, label visibility, layer, orientation, plan readability, readability bias, flip anchors, and text.
We do have forced insertion, but it is grayed out because we are doing our insertion based on a specific point that we've selected. So sometimes these will be grayed out depending on the type of label that you're using, but there shouldn't be additional data showing up inside of this window here. So moving on, we have our layout tab.
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Again, we have the options for having text, line, blocks, and reference text. In our case here, we have a station offset label, which is the text with the contents, and then we have a marker. And so this marker is a block that marks the location of the label that we have created.
So it's marking the point with the station and offset location. So from here, I'm going to go ahead and go to station offset, and I'm going to take a look at contents. We've already gone over the name, visibility, anchor component, anchor point.
These are things that can be dropped down and selected or checked true or false or information typed in. But the important thing to note is the different types of contents you can get from the different label styles that you're going to have. So for this station offset, I'm going to go ahead and click on the ellipses.
From here, I can drop down and see there's a wide range of data that I can get from an alignment using a station offset label style. So I can get offsets, station offset side, station value, raw station, station equation ID, northings, eastings. If you had a design speed set for your alignment, the design speed could be returned.
Instantaneous direction, perpendicular direction, alignment names, descriptions, lengths, start station or end station. If you needed to return any of this information based on a question that somebody may have given you based on data that you need to present inside of your design drawings, then this is where you're going to find that data. So this label style was set up really well with basically returning different types of information.
We have our alignment name, we have a station value. We had a station setup, station equation ID. Then we have our offset, we have it returning what side it's coming from, we have a northing and we have an easting.
So I don't find any fault in this label style. So I don't want to add or take away anything. So I'm going to go ahead and click OK.
And then I'm going to move on to the drag state. The drag state again is the same as any other drag state, you are defining what the leader is going to look like. And then what the text is going to look like in the drag state.
So in our case, we did not indicate any kind of drag state for any of these. But based on looking at this, if I were to do a drag state on these labels, I would assume that there would be no border that would show up because I have border visibility set to false. We can go ahead and test that once we're done here.
But then we have the summary tab, which has the summary of all the previous tabs and the components from the previous tabs showing up here. So I'm going to go ahead and click OK. And then let's test that theory out for the drag state, we're going to go to any of these station offsets, we're going to select it.
And I'm going to go ahead and grab this square grip for move label, I'm going to go ahead and move it out. And in the drag state, in fact, does not have a border around it. So dealing with these labels, it's not difficult, but it is time-consuming.
But once you have all of your label styles set up, the workflow and the designing inside of civil 3D moves very fast. It's very efficient. So I'm going to go ahead and save.
And then I'll meet you in the next video where we'll talk about a couple other label styles.
