Datasheet

WINDOWS ON THE MODEL 9
Figure 1.6
The Ambient Settings
tab with the General
branch expanded
You can approach this tab in the following ways:
◆ Top to bottom — Expand one branch, handle the settings in that branch, and then close it
and move to the next.
◆ Print and conquer — Expand all the branches using the Expand All Categories button found
at lower right.
After you have expanded the branches, right-click in the middle of the displayed options
and select Copy to Clipboard. Then paste the settings to Excel for review, as you did with
the Object Layers tab.
Sharing the Workload
The Print and Conquer approach makes it easy to distribute multiple copies to surveyors, land plan-
ners, engineers, and so on and let them fill in the changes. Then, creating a template for each group
is a matter of making their changes. If you’re asking end users who aren’t familiar with the product
to make these changes, it’s easy to miss one. Working line by line is fairly foolproof.
After you decide how to approach these settings, get to work. The settings are either drop-down
menus or text boxes (in the case of numeric entries). Many of them are self-explanatory and com-
mon to land-development design. Let’s look at these settings in more detail (see Figure 1.6).
Plotted Unit Display Type Remember, Civil 3D knows you want to plot at the end of the
day. In this case, it’s asking you how you would like your plotted units measured. For example,
would you like that bit of text to be 0.25

tall or
1
4

high? Most engineers are comfortable with
the Leroy method of text heights (L80, L100, L140, and so on), so the decimal option is the
default.