Labeling all of a surface's contours at once?

[ltmullen]

Often I've found myself dealing with some pretty complicated surfaces that have a lot of nooks and crannies, and many of the contour lines are only in a corner of the surface or are small and closed, and thus when I find myself wanting to have contour labels on all of the contours, there's not really one line I can draw using the "Create Multiple Labels at Interval" option to ensure that every contour is labeled. Thus I end up doing "Create Multiple At Interval" with a few different lines intersecting contours, but I often end up hitting some of the contours multiple times and I get a mess of labels.

I haven't been able to find a way to automatically just multiple labels on all of the contours at an interval in one fell swoop, so I started trying to program one...but then I got stuck with that, too.

Does anyone know of a built-in method of doing what I want to do, or do I need to continue pursuing a programmatic solution?

Thanks!

[Neilw_05]

I submitted a wish for that ability some time ago. For now you'll have to resort to workarounds.

[jmayo-EE]

One other unfortunate thing to note is that the Contour at Interval command can place a LOT of labels in a file and this can degrade performance.

[neilyj666]

Yes I certainly agree with this - do you need to label all contours or could you just selectively use spot levels instead and the user can deduce the contour value knowing the interval?

[christopher]

Did you happen to see this post I did a while back? http://blog.civil3dreminders.com/2009/11/mass-label-contours.html

It should be all of the code you need to accomplish the task. It could even be optimized/or changed to work better with the current API. I was sending the command to the command line instead of using the API to add the labels, which wasn't available at the time I did the post. 

[Neilw_05]

One of the big downsides to applying labels at intervals is it creates many short contour label lines in the drawing. If you then change the contour interval of the surface style, many of those labels don't hit any more and it is a tedious process to fix. The whole contour label line paradigm is flawed for this scenario.

My wish is for the option to apply a label interval to the surface style itself and have them automatic and dynamic. Ideally it would also be able to resolve label conflicts such as in GIS.