There are some things with Parcels that really bite, at least in 2007. Don't know if any of them have been fixed in 2008.
Key issue is that parcels don't fully model what we do in the real world. In the real world, we have the equivalent of "nested parcels". In other words, we have a large area of land. This area of land gets split into districts. These districts get split into subdivisions or filings. These subdivisions or filings get split into things like lots/tracts and ROW. At each, level, there's a logical grouping of parcels. And at the lowest level, there are two distinct types of elements - ROW and lots/tracts. The key difference between them is that ROW is based on an alignment.
C3D does not model this particularly well. Instead, you get Parcels, and the only way to group parcels is in a Site. So you can sort-of use a Site to equate to a Subdivision or Filing boundary. This lets you use the Site boundary as your outer subdivision boundary. But Sites are independent of each other, so you have to manually keep Sites synchronized with each other. And there's a way of creating ROW parcels from alignments, but the connection is not persistent. If you move the alignment, the parcels stay where they are.
And there are lots of problems with parcel labels. The worst is what I call the "style breeding problem". Part of the problem is the inability to override the style settings for individual labels, leading to the creation of lots of styles. Another is the fact that text height is part of the style, so the user must create lots of similar styles to get labels with different text heights. But there are also serious problems with curve labels, which seem to date back to the old "an arc is always defined counterclockwise" thing in the core product. And spanning labels can be a real pain. And it's difficult to get the equivalent of Land Desktops' "direction, distance on same side of line". And then there's the inability to position labels differently in different viewports. And then there's...
Ah, but I could go on for quite some time. There are a ton of problems, but all-in-all, I think I like it better than Land Desktop. And hopefully the implementation will get better quickly. I, for one, would like Autodesk to completely redesign the labels. For example, I'd like to see labels that can be configured to space out evenly along line segments, but auto-stack to fit available space on short segments, rather than requiring multiple label styles.
Sinc
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