I firmly believe that for us Carlson Civil/Survey is the best for us. That said, for the entire duration I have used this software I have had issues with a few things. It is probably my misuse of the software, and I would appreciate any suggestions. I will give a few examples:
1. Draw a special leader. The text won't be the same size and the preset dtext size. The options at the command line level on special leaders won't give me the ability to set text size, and they won't use the current dtext size. This is a severe time burner for me.
2. Draw a regular leader. The processes and defaults seem to me that they should look like those for the special leader, but they do not resemble it at all. And arrowhead settings are done differently. Another time burner for me.
3. Label coordinates: The text and arrows are set differently there than above. Another time burner.
4. Bearing end line leaders......
5. Acreage text size
6. Special line text size....
I am sure I am missing something, but is there some way to make this consistent so that I can draft with speed? Any suggestions would be appreciated. I like consistency, and I just don't see it so far as it relates to these items.
Again, Carlson is still the best out there BY FAR, and it would be great if I could figure this out so this nuisance doesn't hit me every time I sit down and try to start using the 6 items above.
Current Layer
Current Text Height
These are a couple of things that are apparently lost on Carlson programmers.
For a "regular leader" I have created this macro for my toolbar:
^C^CORTHO;OFF;_leader;'ORTHO;ON;;;N;ORTHO;OFF;
I submitted these issues into the Carlson programming team and was told today from Dave Carlson that "we have worked on many of these for the 2014 release." I don't have any of the specifics but am hopeful these improvements will help increase your efficiency.
Thanks, Ladd.
I am glad that Carlson is not losing sight of the importance of basic routines. These simple improvements will increase efficiency and speed substantially on normal everyday drafting.
One more issue that seems to occur in Carlson Civil is the loss of the current folder when things are saved. It might be a Windows thing. Let's say I am working in a new project folder called Mall Development. When I get ready to save my drawing it should default there, but it doesn't. It sort of randomly makes it own default of a previous project. Is there a fix or a proper operating procedure to prevent this from happening. It wastes a LOT of time.
Another routine that Carlson should consider in SurvCE is the firing of a Disto automatically in the Auto Collect Mode and adding the Disto reading as a substitute for the point descriptor. The laser distance could be recorded in the field of the description. For example, the coordinate might be as follows:
1, 223000.0171, 3435160.1556, 324.86, 17.2
The 17.2 is simple the laser distance. The enduser can export to ascii and use it for whatever he wants to. You would be surprised how much that would be used. Right now we use TDS, Trimble, but we would switch tomorrow if you had that simple thing added to Auto Collect. I have been asking for it for a year. Seems simple, and I can attest to the fact that your endusers will find some interesting uses for this.
It would also be GREAT if SurvCE would record RTK GPS information and add a time stamp to the nearest 0.1 second from the GPS to the coordinate. There are some huge uses for this. If that is done, the longer field would easily allow the descriptor and time stamp and the coordinate would read:
1, 223000.0171, 3435160.1556, 324.86, wall, 17.2, 18:30:01.1UTC
The routines I suggest above would be enough reason for me to add a Carlson GPS to our tool chest IMMEDIATELY.
