Datasheet

18 CHAPTER 1 GETTING DIRTY: THE BASICS OF CIVIL 3D

Figure 1.15

The Label Style

Composer

Who Built That Style?

It’s a good idea to always put something in the style name to indicate it wasn’t in the box. Putting

your initials or ﬁrm name at the beginning of the style is one way to make it easy to differenti-

ate your styles from the prebuilt ones. Here, JW stands for James Wedding (EG stands for Existing

Ground).

3. 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 pause the exercise, and look at them fur-

ther:

Text Style is the default style for text components that are created on the Layout tab. It’s

a good practice to use a zero-height text style with the appropriate font, because you’ll

set the plotted heights in the style anyway.

Layer is the layer on which the components of a label are inserted, not the layer on which

the label itself is inserted. Think of labels as nested blocks. The label (the block) gets

inserted on the layer on the basis of the object layers you saw 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 appearance of the components if you like.

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 set this to View to maintain the most plan-readable

labels with the smallest amount of editing later.