Staggering Section View Labels for Transportation in Civil 3D

Recently I have been creating Civil 3D styles for transportation projects and was working on labels for the typical section in section view. The purpose of the labels is to show the offset and elevation on corridor points of the assembly (typical section).

Civil 3D section label styles contain a Corridor Points collection for defining the label which of course resides on the Settings tab of the Toolspace. My first step was to create a Corridor Points label style that provided content properties for Subassembly Point Offset and Subassembly Point Elevation.

Also, an important step in this process is to define a Section Label Set that contains the Corridor Points label style that can be applied to the Corridor when creating the Section View.

Once the Section Label Set was defined it was now time to put it to use. When creating the Section View, the wizard provides a dialog called “Section Display Options” that allows you to set the Label Set style used for the sections that will be drawn. I set the Label Set for the corridor to the new Label Set for Corridor Points in the Label Set column.

The results were just what I wanted and now have labels showing the offset and elevation at points along the assembly in the section. However, those labels are crowded and crossing over one another. Not exactly the look I was going for but does contain the information that is intended to be conveyed.

Thankfully, Civil 3D has a solution that will allow the information to be conveyed and in a format that is readable. As part of the Section Label Set there are Stagger properties that help to dynamically adjust the labels to remedy crowding and overlap. Open the Label Set style and scroll to the far right, there will be a column, Stagger Labels and there you can set how you want the labels to be staggered. In the next columns heights can be set for Stagger lines 1 and 2.

For existing Section Views, these same Stagger settings can be applied by selecting the labels and picking the Edit Label Group command on the contextual ribbon.

The results are a nicely spaced set of corridor point labels that are now readable.

If you are currently manually adding these labels, this is a great way to save time and have the labels automatically applied and dynamically updated when changes are made to the corridor.

About the Author

Civil Applications Expert<br><br>With extensive experience in both engineering and IT, Brian helps organizations make the most of their design technology. Whether it’s through a custom setup, training, implementation, or creation of organization-specific templates and styles, Brian helps both users and managers understand the best methods and processes to get the most from their chosen solutions.

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