automatically separating points?????

[Ryan Ease]

It's near 2008, and there still isn't a tool to automatically separate civil points? Is there a union of low level draftsman keeping this feature out of cad for job security?

[brian.hailey933139]

And what do you mean by automatically separating the civil points? What are you trying to accomplish?

[Ryan Ease]

As a surveyor who makes plots for engineers who want to see ALL the points on one plot, I have to take what we shot in the field, and separate the points in the drawing in the areas where shots overlap.

A curb is usually only .5' wide, but on a 40 scale drawing, to read a point description easily, your font height has to be equivalent to 2.5'. So my top and bottom of curb shots overlap, and I have to drag the descriptions around so they don't look like a blob of ink. Thats just curbs, tight areas that require a ton of points for proper definition are a huge PITA.

So every time I start drafting a new job, my first step is to separate all the points, so I can see them, and so the engineers can read the plot. Doing separate layers isn't an option, because usually they want to see everything on their worksheets, which is understandable.

[brian.hailey933139]

Ah, I understand now. I thought perhaps you wanted them to be separated into groups or something along those lines. You should post this up in the wishes area.

[sinc]

And to make this task even more onerous, Point Labels will regularly reset.

For example, if you drag all the point labels around so you can read them, but then renumber the points, all the point labels will reset. So you get to go around and drag all the labels again.

I remember requesting a feature like this three or four years ago, but it was a request for Land Desktop. Many Land Desktop enhancement requests made their way into C3D, but unfortunately, not this one.

Of course, this is made somewhat more problematic now, with the auto-scaling of Point Labels based on Annotation Scale.

[slong]

Eaglepoint has a leader attribute tool- (and we use it often). I'm glad I read this post, as we are looking to replace EP with something this month (either Civil 3D or Carlson). Does Civil 3D allow you to customize the layers and the font of the attributes on the survey points?

[brian.hailey933139]

Does Civil 3D allow you to customize the layers and the font of the attributes on the survey points?

Absolutely! You can do just about anything you want with the labels. What specifically are you looking for?

[margaretl]

Eaglepoint has a leader attribute tool- (and we use it often). I'm glad I read this post, as we are looking to replace EP with something this month (either Civil 3D or Carlson). Does Civil 3D allow you to customize the layers and the font of the attributes on the survey points?

LD 2004 has the ability to turn on leaders as you have mentioned. I believe this is also an option in C3D. It is in the display properties of the point in LD.

We are using Carlson Survey with LD 2004. I have researched Carlson stand alone and found it to be great on the survey calculations end, but lacking on the drafting end. I have yet to be able to do extensive testing with the current C3D release to see if Adesk has fixed all of my qualms on the survey side. Adesk did add a couple of items that were missing, i.e. Best Fit Line and Best Fit Curve.

I still feel we will eventually need to goto C3D.

[slong]

Brian

I have a custom setup in EP that allows different Point "Styles"
Certain field codes plot "Topo points" style - ( pt ID, description, elev)
Other field Codes plot "Control Points" style with (Point ID, Description Elev, northing, Easting )
Also the Font used for the Point ID, Desc, or elevation, etc can be different- even within a "style"
They can also be assigned different layers within the master "Block layer" for that field code (All points in EP are Attributed blocks, with the insertion point at the coordinates of the actual survey shot.)
Does Civil 3D allow for that. I saw that Carlson has a Civil Desktop module that runs with desktop (i don't know about civil 3D) that deals with this field to finish stuff and wondered whether Civil 3D was "weak' in this area -so Carlson was "picking up the slack"- so to speak.

[sinc]

C3D can do most of that. However, all components of a style are on the same layer, and all components must use the same font.

It is also problematic trying to get components with different text sizes. The way Autodesk provided only works when the point is not dragged - as soon as you drag the point, all the text becomes the same size. There is a hack for getting around this, which involves creating text in an MTEXT editor, changing the text size there, and then copy-and-pasting the text into the component editor. This copies some embedded formatting commands, which allows you to get different text sizes in the label when it is in the dragged state.

All in all, it's possible to do a lot of things, but C3D labels are not very-well thought out, designed, or implemented. It is possible to use them to get work done, but they leave an awful lot to be desired. They have some advantages to Annotative Text, but some disadvantages, too. However, despite their problems, they are better than QLeaders and pre-2008 text and mtext, and usually work better than Annotative Text because, unlike Annotative Text, C3D Labels are integrated with C3D design elements.