AutoCAD Civil 3D

[#1]

Any progress on this issue in versions 2010-2013?  I came across this situation today trying to create an exhibit (at a different scale) from a plan/profile drawing, where the scale of the C3D lableling looks fine in plan view, but is too large (by a factor of two) for the exhibit.  I remember similar display problems in the past, anything new in the latest versions I should be aware of?

Thanks

[#2]

I would also really like a solution to this.  There has been a lot of times where I could be doing with this.

[#3]

I do this by creating an Expression for fixed heights and using that for the text height in the Style. You have to create one style for each height. These are usually used for stakeout diagrams where we want to show the points quite large but not have other text and notes scaled up.

This is the expression for a height of 0.6 of the drawing scale 0.6 / {Drawing Scale Conversion}. It's from a metric drawing. You can paste that in to the Expression or you can get the Drawing Scale Conversion by clicking on the function icon in the Edit Expression dialog box.

Allen

[#4]

As Allen says, you can always create a Style that forces a specific height.  But that gets back into the "Style Breeding" problem, as well as creating tons of Styles that confuse junior users (or anyone new to your company), so I'm not particularly a fan of that process.

There's a weakness in C3D where, especially if you are using the Plan&Production tools, it is NOT easy to create plots at different scales.  I was dealing with this issue recently in some of my training, where they wanted to be able to create plots at 24x36 as well as at 11x17, yet they didn't want to simply scale down the bigger drawings to 11x17.  My recommendation was to just create everything at 24x36, then use a Page Setup Override (via the Sheet Set Manager) to print an 11x17 version, even though that would result in things like your Scales being wrong.  After all, in practice, it's a bad idea to scale things off an 11x17 reduction in any case, so why worry that the scale isn't right...?

But then, we've also been moving toward giving plans to our field guys in the form of a tablet (like an iPad), so they don't even have paper plans at all anymore...  That kind of really throws away any desire to scale off a reduced set of plans.

[#5]

It really pains me to say this, but I have been known to enlarge my title block, calculate out alternate viewport scales, then "scale to fit" my drawing.  (Say for instance, scaling a title block up by 2.5x to get 20 scale annotation on 50 scale viewports, making a 30x42 drawing into a 75x105 drawing)  I really hate doing that because it's prone to error when other people work with your files, but it can get you a 50 scale drawing with 20 scale text.  You also have to then set the print scale at the inverse (1/2.5 = 0.4) or scale to fit.  The scale to fit is tricky--because you have to have a boundary at the edge of your limits and 0 margins, or else you get something dumb like 0.38 instead of 0.40 scaling.