Datasheet

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CHAPTER 1 GETTING DIRTY: THE BASICS OF CIVIL 3D
First, right-click the Spot Elevation folder and select New in the pop-up menu to open the Label
Style Composer, as shown in Figure 1.15.
On the Information tab, change the name to something appropriate. In this case, we’ll use
JW-EG.
Figure 1.15
Label Style Composer
Next, switch to the General tab. Change the layer to C-TOPO-TEXT by clicking the layer cell
and then the More button to the right of that cell. There are a fair number of options
here, so let’s look at them further:
Text Style is the default style for the text components that will be created on the Layout tab. It’s
a good practice to just use a zero-height text style with the appropriate font since you’ll set the
plotted heights in the style anyway.
Layer is the layer that the components of a label get inserted on, not the layer the label itself gets
inserted on. Think of labels as nested blocks. The label (the block) gets inserted on the layer on
the basis of the object layers we looked at earlier. The components of the label get inserted on the
layer that is set here. This means a change to the specified layer can control or change the appear-
ance of the components if desired.
Orientation Reference sets an object to act as the up direction in terms of readability. Civil 3D
understands viewpoint rotation and offers the option to rotate or flip labels to keep them plan
readable. Most users will want to set this to View to maintain the most plan-readable labels with
the smallest amount of editing later.
Who Built That Style?
It’s a good idea to always put something in the style name to indicate it wasn’t one in the box. Putting
your initials or firm at the beginning of the style is one way to make it easy to differentiate your styles
from the prebuilt ones. Here, JW stands for James Wedding (EG stands for Existing Ground).
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