OK, I will admit that I have been only working with Civil 3D for less than a year. Our survey department adopted (for the most part) the Florida Department of Transportation Civil 3D Template. Pretty much all of our point symbols scale up or down with the drawing scale and most of our text is annotative text which supports different scales. The issue is that we usually draw at 1" = 20' to capture the amount of detail necessary for engineering design. However, our engineering department usually works at 1" = 40'. One of our engineering techs says that when they bring our survey into their plans, all of the symbols scale to twice as big as shown on the survey and the annotative text tries to rescale which makes it unreadable. Is there any way to keep Civil 3D from trying to rescale the survey to the engineering scale?
Most of that happens because of the users personal settings for their drawing template and not everyone will use the same.
- It happens on quite a few packages. Some also have options for setting drawing scale view and screen scale view separately. We once had a client where we had to go round to his office with each job and set the local settings for him. There is no easy solution - engineering techs should know how to change the settings, or they are less techs than they think they are!
Most reviewing jurisdictions around here have minimum text height requirements which is usually 0.1".?ÿ Obviously in your example if the block and text are sized?ÿproperly at 20 scale and then presented in a 40 scale drawing?ÿbut not resized everything with be too small by half.?ÿ If you have no such minimum sizing requirements to worry about you can pretty easily make your MTEXT non-annotative as well as make your block symbols non-annotative.?ÿ?ÿThere are several other routes you could go but if 90% of your work is at a particular scale setting everything up non-annotative is probably the simplest.?ÿ ??¯?ÿ
There is something wrong on his end.?ÿ We work in this exact manner with no issues whatsoever.?ÿ We also have a main Cad person that sets up every computer with the exact settings too.?ÿ Check the odd shaped triangle annotation objects on the lower right of their screen and make sure they are turned off/on appropriately. Annotative scaling can be tricky when things are not setup correctly.
Without knowing exactly how you set up point styles and what it is the tech doesn't like about them, it's hard to make suggestions, but in the end, Civil 3D should make your life easier when it comes to switching between different scales.?ÿ If you already know this, I apologize, but I would play around with your point style marker settings. Most of the time I will make these Use drawing scale, but for some things I might Use fixed scale.
As for annotative text, I'm not really a fan of doing that. I don't know what labels you are using, but I like to use Civil 3D Note styles for labels (Toolspace>Settings>General>Label Styles>Note). These will also scale with your drawing scale, and can be set up to orient with your view and add leaders if the note is dragged, among other things. In the example, I created a specific note for this Township and County, where I would only have to edit the S-T-R.
The issue is that we usually draw at 1" = 20' to capture the amount of detail necessary for engineering design. However, our engineering department usually works at 1" = 40'.
As noted above, there are a number of ways to skin this cat and what is appropriate depends on the workflow of the entire team and the contract requirements.
To contribute to an efficient project work flow you need to understand how the deliverables are going to be used. Historically, a hard copy topo drawing was used extensively by the design team - times changed and I find that none of our engineering clients need or want a hard copy topo drawing as part of their design process. These drawings are simply rolled up and stuck in a corner. You might want to prepare one so that you have a sealed and signed document demonstrating what was delivered (in the event that things get contentious in the future) but I suspect that most/all of the requirements for hard copy topo drawings on design projects are simply remnants from days gone by.
If your topo drawing doesn't have life beyond their use in the design plans (or if the other uses are minor or secondary), then you can avoid most of the issues you describe by providing the topo with annotation and scaling set up at the same scale as the design plans will be. So many times all of the effort spent making things look proper at 1"=SomeScaleOtherThanDesignPlans goes down the toilet as soon as the designer starts working with the topo. If you want to submit your topo at 1"=SomeScaleOtherThanDesignPlans then feel free to change the scale for the topo plot but BUILD your drawings at 1"=SameScaleAsDesignPlans and transmit the digital copy at that scale.
Having said that - I get a great deal of satisfaction out of a well built topo drawing that communicates clearly through the use of succinct relevant notes, logical symbology, distinctive linetypes, and the wise use of whitespace. Unfortunately, all of the nuance required to make a great drawing goes out the window as soon as it's used at a different scale.
Every situation is different so do what's best for the situation at hand.
I agree with?ÿ JKinAK...This sounds more like a communication issue than a civil 3D issue. In our workflow, standard engineering drawings are 1"=50' which works for about 75% of our projects and that is the scale we use for drafting. The other 25% of work, we get the engineering project manager and go over drawing scale and viewport rotation. I am sure that the drawings are great at 20 scale, but once the scale changes all that hard work is shot...which has to be frustrating to everyone. I would suggest working at 40 scale and then if the engineer wants more detail he can switch to 20 and everything would work great.
?ÿ
use mtext and annotative.
?ÿ
Using Dtext with annotative will cause the text to scale up, but overlap. Mtext will maintain both scale and line spacing.