////// Applying Profile Styles

Applying Profile Styles

posted by on April 24, 2018
As with any object style, you can use profile styles to show profiles in different ways for different purposes. Specifically, you can use profile styles to affect the appearance of profiles in three basic ways. The first is to control which components of the profile are visible. You might be surprised to know that there are potentially eight different components of a profile. The second is to control the graphical properties of those components, such as layer, color, linetype, and so on. Finally, a profile style enables you to control the display of markers at key geometric points along the profile. Once again, you might be surprised at the number of types of points that can be marked along a profile: there are 11 of them.

To see how different profile styles can be used to affect the display of profiles in your drawing, follow these steps:
  1. Open the drawing named Profile Styles.dwg located in the Chapter 08 class data folder.
    Tips :Be sure that your background color is set to white before proceeding with these steps.
  2. On the Jordan Court profile view, click the red existing ground profile and then click Profile Properties on the ribbon.
    Tips :Since the majority of the work in this section is done in profile view, the drawings are not set up with multiple viewports.
  3. On the Information tab of the Profile Properties dialog box, change the style to _No Display. Then click OK. The profile disappears from view.

    4. Using a Style to Hide an Object

    In step 3 in the section “Applying Profile Styles,” you used the style _No Display to hide the profile, something that you might have normally done by turning off or freezing a layer. This method of making things disappear via style is used quite a bit in Civil 3D. In fact, if you look inside the stock template that ships with Civil 3D, you’ll see a _No Display style for nearly every object type.

    Using this approach has a couple of advantages over turning layers on and off. First, many Civil 3D objects have multiple components that can be displayed on different layers. Changing one style is more efficient than changing several layers, so it becomes easier and quicker to control the visibility of components by style. Second, you may not know which layer or layers need to be turned off to make the object disappear from view. By simply applying the _No Display style, you make the items disappear without considering layers at all.
  4. Press Esc to clear the selection of the existing ground profile. Then click the black design profile for Jordan Court. Right-click and select Properties.
  5. In the Properties window, change the Style property to Layout and press Esc to clear the grips. The profile now shows curves and lines as different colors and includes markers that clearly indicate where there are key geometry points (see Figure 8.1). This might be helpful while you’re in the process of laying out the profile, but it may not work well when you’re using the profile to create a final drawing.
    The Layout profile style displays lines and curves
    Figure 8.1  The Layout profile style displays lines and curves with different colors as well as markers at key geometric locations.
    Tips :You can also use the specific Profile Properties command to access the style assignment. To show it a different way, however, in step 5 you’re using the generic Properties command instead.
  6. Select the Jordan Court profile once again. In the Properties window, change the style to Basic. This is a very simple style that shows just the basic geometry with no markers or color differences.
  7. Change the style to Design Profile With Markers. This style displays the lines and curves on the standard road profile layer, includes markers that are typically used for annotation, and shows the line extensions as dashed lines. This style is an example of how you might represent a profile in a final drawing.
  8. In Prospector, expand AlignmentsCenterline AlignmentsJordan CourtProfiles. Right-click Jordan Court EGCL and select Properties, as shown in Figure 8.2.
    Using Prospector to access the Properties
    Figure 8.2  Using Prospector to access the Properties command for the Jordan Court EGCL profile.
    Tips :Remember that this profile was set to _No Display, so the only way to get to it is through the Prospector tab.
  9. Change the style to Existing Ground Profile and click OK so that it looks like it did when you started this exercise.

A Note about Units

Throughout this discuss, you'll notice that two values are provided for units of measurement. The first value is provided for the imperial system that is used in the United States, and the second value, in parentheses, is provided for the metric system that is used in many other countries. These values most often represent imperial feet and metric meters. It is important to note that, generally, only the numeric values are entered in the software, not terms like feet or meters. Also, you should know that the two numbers provided are not necessarily equal. In most cases, they are similar values that are rounded to work efficiently in their respective measurement systems.

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