Creating a Station Elevation Label Style: Step-by-Step Guide

Customizing Station Elevation Label Style in Symbol3D: Enhancing Label Appearance and Visibility

Learn how to customize the label style for station elevation labels in this detailed guide. The article explains the process from locating the label style in the settings tab to editing specific aspects of the label such as the layout, contents, drag state, and even adding a border around the text.

Key Insights

  • The article begins by guiding users to locate the station elevation label style under the settings tab in the tool space window, then breaking out label styles to reach the station elevation option.
  • From there, the guide highlights how to edit specific aspects of the label style, such as the general tab, layout tab, and contents. It points out that the most significant changes occur in the contents for the text, depending on what kind of label style is being dealt with.
  • Finally, the article explains how users can customize the drag state of the label style, namely deciding the arrowhead style and size, leader line type and weight, and even the border visibility. The guide concludes by demonstrating how to apply these changes and save the updated label style.

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In this video, we're going to talk about doing the label style for our station elevation label right here. So to do that, we're going to go to the same spot that we were before.

We're going to be in the settings tab of our tool space window. We're going to go to our profile view. We're going to break that out.

We're going to break out label styles, and then we're going to go to station elevation. We're going to break this out. And from here, we can see that we have two different styles right now, standard and station elevation.

So this little golden triangle gives us an indication that that is a label style that's currently being used in the drawing. Since we only have two and only one of them is being used, we know that this label here is the station elevation label style. So I'm going to go ahead and right click on this.

I'm going to select edit. And now I have the label style composer station elevation window open. So inside of here, we again have the information tab that has a name, who created it.

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We could write in a description. You would have to fill out this information if we were creating a new label style. So from here, we're going to go to the general tab.

Again, this is going to be the same as you see for any label style inside Civil 3D. We have the text style, label visibility, layer. We have orientation reference, forced insertion, plan readability, readability bias, and flip anchors with text.

The important part is getting to the layout tab. Again, we have the options for text, line, blocks, and reference text. In this, we only have one piece of text, and that is our text that's going to return station and elevation.

So from here, we have the options for the name, visibility, anchor component, and anchor point, just the same as we had in the other label style that we had. We also have the contents, text height, rotation angle, attachment, X and y offsets, color, line weight, and maximum width, and our border information. So these are all going to look the same for any kind of label style you do.

The change that's going to take place is what's in the contents for the text. So because we're dealing with a station elevation label style, the information inside of the text is going to be different from what we saw in our depth. If we drop this window down inside properties, so what I did is I clicked on the ellipsis to open up this new window.

Right now, I want to station an elevation label, so I'm not going to change any of this data. I'm going to go ahead and click OK and leave it as is, and then I'm going to move to the drag state. So inside of the drag state, we have the information for what our arrowhead style is going to be, what our arrowhead size is going to be, what the visibility is, what type of leader we have, the line type, the line weight, and then we have how the drag state component is.

We have our display, so stacked text versus compressed. Border visibility is set to false. Now this is the thing that I want to change.

I actually liked the border around the text for when we didn't have it in the drag state, so I'm going to go ahead and turn border visibility to true, and I'm going to have my border type as rectangular, and I will leave my background mask as false. So I'm going to go ahead and leave the rest as is, and then moving on to the summary tab, same as the depth label style window, we have the information on the previous tabs showing up here and can be edited based on just expanding these out. So I could have just gone to drag state component, expanded this out, went to border visibility, and then checked it to be true.

So I'm going to go ahead and hit Apply and hit OK, and so now we can see this label style has been updated to include a box around the text in our drag state. So I'm going to go ahead and save, and then I'll meet you in the next video.

photo of Michael Kinnear

Michael Kinnear

Civil 3D Instructor

Mike is a Civil Engineer and a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He brings a wealth of experience working on transportation engineering and site development projects that involve working with Civil 3D, AutoCAD, and MicroStation. Mike is an avid hiker and enjoys spending time with his family in the local Cuyamaca and Laguna mountains.

  • Autodesk Certified Instructor (ACI)
  • Autodesk Certified AutoCAD Civil 3D Professional
  • Civil 3D
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