Datasheet

CHAPTER 1 GettinG Dirty: the Basics of civil 3D

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

planners, 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

common 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 exam-

ple, would you like that bit of text to be 0.25” tall or ¼” 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.

Set AutoCAD Units This displays whether or not Civil 3D should attempt to match

AutoCAD drawing units, as speciﬁed on the Units and Zone tab.

Save Command Changes to Settings This setting is incredibly powerful but a secret to

almost everyone. By setting it to Yes, your changes to commands will be remembered from

use to use. This means if you make changes to a command during use, the next time you call

that Civil 3D command, you won’t have to make the same changes. It’s frustrating to do work

over because you forgot to change one out of the ﬁve things that needed changing, so this

setting is invaluable.

Figure 1.6

The Ambient Set-

tings tab with the

General branch

expanded

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