Contour Label Mask

[Anonymous]

I am having difficulty getting my contour labels to mask. They are masked on
the screen but not when I plot. I have tried plotting to several different
plotters with different plot styles but nothing seems to work. Am I missing
an autocad variable for this. My label styles are all set up to mask, I have
tried to turn the border on and plot nothing, I have tried increasing the
gap nothing. Any help would be great.
Thanks,
Thomas Glidewell
Civil 3D 07 all sps

[mherranz]

It seems none of the label masks I've done are working either. My textmask/wipeouts work on my HP plotters, and they exist side-by-side with C3D's label masks. Obviously it's a different process for masking.

[Anonymous]

There is a setting in the PC3 file that will fix this. It is called Merge
Control. It must be set to Line Overwrite for the masking to work. This will
also allow mtext background masking to work. The disadvantage is if you use
shaded linework, they will plot on top of solid linework unless your draw
order is set properly. This is also true of solid hatching. If you have a
Xerox plotter, then you can't use the HDI driver, you have to use the HPGL
system printer driver to get them to plot. Then if you want to print raster
images with that system printer, good luck. I have been waiting for Xerox to
come out with a new driver for about two months since I discovered these
problems.

If you are printing directly through a system printer, you will have to
change your ways and setup a PC3 file, but you can still have the PC3 file
print directly to your plotter.

--
Tom Berning
Woolpert, Inc
Dell Latitude D800, 1.6ghz 2gb RAM
Win 2000 SP4
Civil 3D 2007, LDT 2007, LDT 2005
wrote in message news:5271838@discussion.autodesk.com...
It seems none of the label masks I've done are working either. My
textmask/wipeouts work on my HP plotters, and they exist side-by-side with
C3D's label masks. Obviously it's a different process for masking.

[mherranz]

I've got all my streets hathed with a solid 20% gray color and have to have all my lines/colors merge so I don't have to set the draworder every time.

What confused me for a few hours this morning is that we have a Kip printer and it doesn't work with 2007's textmask/wipeout feature if you've set your lines to merge instead of overwrite.

[mherranz]

Rather than posting a new thread, I thought maybe posting a follow up here might be better.

I was under the impression that Service Pack 2 resolved this issue (with the label mask). I don't see it any differently when I plot my sheet after installing Service Pack 2.

Anyone else?

[Anonymous]

Tom Berning wrote in
news:5272089@discussion.autodesk.com:

> There is a setting in the PC3 file that will fix this. It is called
> Merge Control. It must be set to Line Overwrite for the masking to
> work. This will also allow mtext background masking to work. The
> disadvantage is if you use shaded linework, they will plot on top of
> solid linework unless your draw order is set properly.

yites...."disadvantage" is in understatement. For me, line overwrite is
not an acceptable solution. In the meantime, I don't have a clue how to
effectively show contour labels without doing in manully...since the text
masking still works.

when grades are small, i can use offset to the contour. but when I have
2:1 slopes, this work-around doesn't work either.

Mike Shick
M.E. Designs
--
Civil3D 2007 SP2
ADT 2007
P4 3.2GHz, 2 GB RAM
ATI (Sapphire) Radeon X800 Pro 256MB

[mikeevans]

One way around this is to LandXMLout the surface then back into R2006, create your contour labels explode the surface and as if by magic the contour line has been trimmed instead of masked.

That's what I'm doing as it takes too long to trim them manually, I don't know why it changed to masking in R2007 and I can't find a way to get it to trim.

I did report this as a bug to no avail, remember if you want complete contour lines for a model just remove the label lines and there they are.

[Anonymous]

So far I can get the labels to mask when I print to my Cannon printer but no luck with my HP plotter. I just noticed this problem today. Sounds like it could be a driver.

[tommier]

I've been using textmask for lots of civil 3d text and plotting to an HP 1050. I haven't, however, tried the contour labels. We use lines overwrite for text mask or lines merge for wipeout. It just depends on the drawing.

[cootis]

i have a issue with plotting..the contour label seems to look perfect in the preview, masking and all works just fine. i have changed the graphics to lines overwrite as stated in this thread above. but it will still plot with a line running through the contour label.
any solutions on this?
draw order is fine too

[mikeevans]

Use R2006 which trimmed the contour line to the text opposed to adding a solid mask : )

Or remove the border and mask, explode and trim the contours to the mtext objects. (what I have to do as R2006 won't authorise on my new PC)

[tmullins]

We are having the same contour mask problem on our KIP. I have tried Overwrite and Merge and neither work. Any ideas?

No problems on our HP1050 and OCE.