Datasheet

IT’S ALL ABOUT STYLE
17
It’s All About Style
Before we get into the program itself, it’s important that we cover one bit of vocabulary and how
it relates to Civil 3D: style. To put it simply, styles control the display properties of Civil 3D objects
and labels. Styles control everything from the color of your point markers to the interval of your
surface contours and from your profile view grid spacing to the text height in the Station-Offset
label of your road alignment. Styles truly are where the power in Civil 3D lies. Label styles and
object styles are the two major categories.
The difficult thing about styles is that it’s hard to talk about them without being specific. We’ll
spend a fair amount of time in later chapters talking about the specifics of the styles for each object
and some time in this chapter looking at the common aspects of style manipulation, but they might
remain a mystery until you really get your hands dirty in later chapters.
Label Styles
To get started, we can look at the styles in the Spot Elevation branch by expanding the Surface
branch and then the Label Styles branch on the Settings tab, as shown in Figure 1.14.
There are two basic label styles in the Spot Elevation branch. Let’s create a new one and explore
the options for making labels. Remember, almost all of these options will be present in other, object-
specific label styles.
Figure 1.14
Spot Elevation
label styles
Running Out of Screen Real Estate?
It’s a good idea to turn on Panorama using this technique, then drag it to the side so that you’ll always
see any new information. While it is possible to turn it off, it’s not recommended—you won’t know
when Civil 3D is trying to tell you something! Place it on your second monitor (by now, you see why you
do need to have a second monitor, don’t you?), and you’ll always be up to date with your Civil 3D model.
And in case you missed it, we were using Panorama when we added the sample VBA macro in the pre-
vious exercise.
67403.book Page 17 Friday, August 31, 2007 2:12 PM