2009 USCA Country Kit Known Issues and Help

Civil 3D is designed to run with tested and stable Feature and Label Styles that work and are not being changed on the fly. When you are creating or making lots of edits to styles, Civil3D will be more unstable than when you use it with the finished tested products.

Since you have to build styles right away to get the software to a working condition, this can lead you to believe the software is unstable and that it does not work. Not true.

Remember creating and editing styles is more like programming than anything else. In fact, some structured programming is exactly what you are doing. They just didn't tell you. Programmers expect things to crash. Save often and expect to things to go bad at unexpected times. They will.

Jump Start has about 2000 styles...how many times do you think we crashed?

 Topics:
Drawings in Civil 3D
     Drawings Start as Model drawings
     They become Data or Xrefs for other Model or Model (design) drawings
     Publish drawings are mostly references

Drawing Types
  Model Drawings
     Need Styles at least based on Task and Features
  Xdata Drawings
     No Styles except perhaps to update
     Purge Styles and Layers Ruthlessly
  Xref Drawings – used to display and annotate the model
     Need Styles at least to Display Feature Content
     Purge before archiving
  Publish Drawings
     No Styles

Code Set Styles
  What they do for Corridors
     Generate the Feature Line line work
     Corridor output can be used for more design
     Generate the Shape fills in Plan
  What they do for Sections
     Generate the cross section view line work and fills for subassemblies
     Generate the labels for the subassembly Shapes and Points

Get Jump Start Working 
  Evaluate and KISS
     Use the demo drawings to explore Styles for Key Features
     Do work with your data and unchanged styles
     The less you tweak the less work you have to do

How to Rip and Tear 
  Remove it if you don’t need it now
  It may exist for a good reason…but you can get it back
Key Issues
  Colors to make IMPORTANT things familiar
  Linetypes to get your look at feel
  Create external Layer States files to restore your layer changes to
  supplied updates and project data drawings
  Edit and OWN the ONLY the Sets and most used Styles

Feature Styles 
    Graphically simple – most changes are to Layers

Label Styles & Label Sets 
    Fonts & Font Size 
    Edit and OWN the most useful Label Sets 
    Reduce the number of Label Styles in YOUR templates

The Maintenance Plan Checklist
    Remember to PDCA (Plan Do Check Analyze) 
    You must have a time frame or everything becomes an emergency and a crisis
    Don’t Fight fires Prevent fires 
        It will never ALL get done at once 
    Do a pass and STOP for a set period of time 
    Document in writing what you changed 
    Create one template that ONLY has your changes 
    Do Work 
    Document in writing what you think must change 
        Updates are going to happen so how do you handle that? 
    Remember – You choose

The Style Update Process
    Make sure you have backups 
       The update process will fail because of ID10T errors – we mess up 
    Make the drawing to update “Current” 
    Use Settings>>Master View 
        The Labels Only view may help but don’t forget it does not show everything you may need to update 
    Update from the other drawing 
    Copy and/or Update Styles from the lowest level and branch in the Toolspace 
    Parent Label Styles come over this way 
    Do the Label Sets Last 
    Be Bored and Systematic 
    When in doubt OVERWRITE

Make Template Updates Easier
    Start with the right ACAD template – stb 
        We supply a NO STYLES template on the Updates page on cadpilot.com 
    Purge the easy to identify “C” and “V” blocks 
    Load the linetypes, hatch patterns, textstyles with Design Center from a 
        copy of your good template after it is updated with changes 
    Load YOUR blocks with Design Center 
        Blocks should use NAMES in the Jump Start template OR
            be completely YOUR OWN – easiest to maintain. 
        Don’t mix and try to match 
    Layer State files make Layer updates easy 
        Make sure they are EXTERNAL and read only 
    Insert Exploded the new update template 
        This will NOT overwrite YOUR changes
    Purge the Layers you KNOW you don’t want 
        Purge ALL works as a Quick Fix 
        All the layers are still in the Update template 
    Tweak New Style Referenced layers and update your external Layer States files 
    Update your OWN Styles & Sets into the drawing 
    Evaluate the new styles that may help your OWN Sets and Styles and own and update them 
    Rip and Tear 
    Go back to work 

Data drawings are different from the drawings used to publish the model 
    Data drawings have almost NO STYLES – Delete Styles
    Data drawings end up as references in Publish drawings

Tell us what you Need
    Email us Style requests in writing
    Your Purpose and the Why are important information 
        Please do not assume we understand 
        It may already be in there but you may have missed it 
    The kind of work you are doing is IMPORTANT too 
    Show a picture of what you want if possible 
If it is Broken, please tell us 
    If we don’t know, we may not fix it.