Labels appearing far too large

[Anonymous]

I have attached two files. The first is a screenshot, and illustrates the issue I'm having. The second is the dwg. of the project.

My understanding is such, that the text height specified in the various settings for labels, is the text height displayed on the paper when printing.

That's not what appears to be the case in the A4-size layout view. The labels are so large that they're off the screen.

What's wrong?

[wfberry]

Perhaps before anyone can answer your questions one should point out that additional information is needed.  It appears you are in the UK based on a couple of things in your settings.

It also appears that you have not used a previous "template" file to begin.  All the label settings in your file are STANDARD only.

Have you had any training using Civil 3D?

I don't mean to offend you.

Bill

[MMcCall402 · Accepted solution]

The trouble appears to be in your page setup. Currently the plot scale is 'Custom' at 1mm = 0.03937. The viewport is very small, approx. 15mm x 23mm, which makes a 3mm label seem huge.

Reset the plot scale in the page setup to 1mm = 1mm. Resize the viewport to fit the page and set a viewport scale.

[Anonymous]

Nope, mostly self-taught. I've been watching a number a number of tutorials on sites like Lynda.com, and reaching out to YouTube and these forums in instances where I cannot figure things out myself. Practically no one in my department has any in-depth knowledge of Civil 3D either.

The map was downloaded from Digimaps online maps database, and was already pre-loaded with it's own crap settings. The scales have been behaving erratically from the start.

Other similar (much less detailed) maps I have of the area behave fine (now), yet this one appears to be 1000x out of proportion when I use the scaling tool. I've no idea how to fix it. Problems I've had before with some of these maps is that although they're 'metric', for some reason all the dimensions and labels were using imperial units instead that I had to go through and change manually.

[neilyj666]

Ensure you always start from a metric template (the UKIE one for example) and insert other content into it.

Also remember that all Civil labels are specified as plotted size in mm so a 3mm label at 1:500 will appear smaller than a 3mm label at 1:5000. A useful hint is to set the modelspace scale to the scale you will be plotting to see how the labels look. Another workflow is to xref all the required dwgs into  a sheet and label the xrefs through a viewport set to the required scale.