Custom Electrical Symbol Text Style

[bradg]

What's the best/easiest way to customize the text style and display of an electrical switch?

Modify the existing blocks?
Create one from scratch?

I'd like to be able to make the text style annotative according to our company standard, right now in particular for our switches. After a decent amount of trial and error, and messing around with drawing scales etc. I was able to get it to work, but I would have to modify it for each individual switch style. Additionally, I'd like to modify the location of the subscript for the switches (e.g. 3-way switch).

Any way to do this for multiple switches across the board, or am I stuck going through and modifying each one individually?

Thanks,
Brad

[RobertB]

FWIW, I chose to eliminate the text (just the "S") and replace it with a polyline that mimics the "text". That way text style changes won't affect our light switches.

And we use our own device styles, not the OOTB ones.

[stelthorst]

What's the best/easiest way to customize the text style and display of an electrical switch?

Modify the existing blocks?
Create one from scratch?

I'd like to be able to make the text style annotative according to our company standard, right now in particular for our switches. After a decent amount of trial and error, and messing around with drawing scales etc. I was able to get it to work, but I would have to modify it for each individual switch style. Additionally, I'd like to modify the location of the subscript for the switches (e.g. 3-way switch).

Any way to do this for multiple switches across the board, or am I stuck going through and modifying each one individually?

Thanks,
Brad

Hi Brad,

I'm assuming you are talking about electrical devices. If you are, you can create the switch block and a text block and then use both of them in your device style. This way once you have one the looks/acts like you want then all you have to do is copy the device style, rename it, and change the text block.

Hope this makes sense, if not, post back and I'll have some 'splainin' to do.

[bradg]

Thanks Scott,

I kind of follow what you're saying, but you may need to go into a bit more detail. I'm not an electrical guy, so most of the stuff is Greek to me, but here's what we'd like to do:

We'd like to modify the Electrical symbols (we've been dealing with mostly Switches for now) so that they reflect the text style our company uses (simplex). For the switches, the big S is fine as the standard default text style, but we'd like the subscript font to display as simplex. There are also some switches we use that are not included in the OOTB content (that we can find at least), such as subscripts a, b, V, etc. Just to clarify, I'm only talking about the plan view display, I've got no problem with re-using the modelspace views of the switches (or eliminating them all together).

Whether or not it's easiest to create these symbols from scratch, or if it's better to just modify the OOTB symbols, I'm not sure, that's where I'm hoping to get some input.

Additionally, I'd like to try and make the entire symbol/device annotative, so we don't have to have 4 different blocks depending on what scale we're using.

Finally, I haven't done much with the electrical portion of AMEP, so I don't quite know what I'm talking about, but I'd like whetever custom symbols/devices we create to behave the same way that the OOTB ones do (connections, properties, etc.)

[RobertB]

Additionally, I'd like to try and make the entire symbol/device annotative, so we don't have to have 4 different blocks depending on what scale we're using.

Devices are annotative when they have the "Use Annotation Scale" option selected in the Views tab of the device style.

[bradg]

Devices are annotative when they have the "Use Annotation Scale" option selected in the Views tab of the device style.

Thanks Robert, I had forgotten about this setting.

However, when I activate it, the device text resizes based on the current Annotation Scale and the Annotation Plot Size (accessible in the Drawing Setup). I can get it to display correctly by messing around with the text scale or Annotation Scale before creating the block, but it's kind of a pain and prone to error.

Any recommendations on how to get them to be annotative at the right heights?

Thanks,
Brad

[RobertB]

Any recommendations on how to get them to be annotative at the right heights?

Content that is targeted for annotative-based objects need to be based on a 1-unit height. For example:
You want a piece of text to be 3/32 plotted. So you create a block where the height of the text is 1 unit. If you want a box around the text to be 1/4 on each side, the actual size of the box will need to be 2.666 units (2.6666 * 0.9375 = 0.25) Then, in Drawing Setup, you set the text height to 3/32" and the scale of the drawing to the appropriate value (let's use 1'-0"=1'-0").
That annotation-based device then ought to have the correct dimensions.