Autodesk Civil 3D Label Style choice and preference is a bit of a quandary for all of us out here in Civil 3D Land. We do attempt to address that complex Civil 3D management and maintenance challenge in our Framework for Civil 3D Jump Kit products. Most customers seem to agree we do a pretty good job. No product is perfect. This can be especially true when we thin down a deep product like Jump Kit into a much thinner trial version. Let me explain.
More Civil 3D Choice and Optionality
Just this week we had a customer who had some excellent formatting questions about the supplied Label Styles that we include in our Templates Only trial products. The Templates Only products include about 3500 Civil 3D Styles for everything Civil 3D under the sun.
Many of our smaller customers use the Templates Only Civil 3D Styles, Civil 3D Templates, and other supplied Civil 3D resources to build and maintain their production Civil 3D environment.
Why recreate the wheel?
The Framework for Civil 3D products like Jump Kit mean that…
Civil 3D Styles are a Commodity
Sometimes too much of a good thing and too much choice can be a problem.
Civil 3D user environments must be managed and maintained.
Up front we directly tell new customers to delete from a copy of the supplied working Civil 3D Template(s) the Styles they don’t expect to use and/or even just the Styles they don’t like.
They can always learn how to get the deleted ones back.
Civil 3D Reference Templates (TREF) are indeed a wonderful thing.
Practically, no one really needs a hundred different Profile View Styles – never mind that many Section View Styles in every working drawing. Yada yada.
Or do they?
How many versions of sanitary sewer Pipe Label Styles do we need?
Yes. We all know that it depends.
More can be better.
The Whines Make Finer Wine
The customer pointed out that some of the supplied Templates Only Pipe Label Styles were inconsistent. This is indeed true. The detailed contents of the supplied Pipe Label Style were indeed formatted differently. Some Parents and Children contained space characters here and there in the label text content while other similar ones did not contain those spaces.
The fact is that some people prefer the readability of the Pipe Label content with the space characters while other customers like the more compact versions sans those same space characters. It is a readability thing.
Civil Engineers and Surveyors can be pretty picky. Let's not start about government agencies.
In any case, any Framework customer can copy and paste the specific text Label content they prefer with a decent ASCII text editor (Notepad++) into the Text Component Editor (TCE) from one Label Style to another in Civil 3D.
We can modify any supplied collection of Parent and Child Label Styles to address our specific preferences.
This technique isn’t all that difficult.
We’ve taught and paid high school interns to do it.
It is just tedious work when we have a large collection of Label Styles to update.
Yeah. To keep the Label Style naming convention and all the Descriptions in synch is a hassle too.
The Framework for Civil 3D asks,
Why Not Deliver More?
To put the Civil 3D Style choice thing in perspective. Jump Kit contains 1000’s of Style resource drawings where each drawing may contain large collections of Label Styles in particular. We stopped counting ages ago.
In answer to the most frequently asked question about Jump Kit,
“It’s in there.”
Now if I could only remember where I put it. Eheh.
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Get the Framework for Civil 3D