Applying Section Labels

At times, you may need to annotate sections with information about their elevations, slopes, offsets, and so on. As you learned in, “Displaying and Annotating Profiles,” label sets enable you to apply multiple labels at once as well as apply important configuration settings to the labels such as increment, weeding, and so on. The AutoCAD® Civil 3D® software environment provides the following four types of labels that can be compiled into a label set:

Major Offset Labels

These labels are placed at constant increments along the section. You can use this label type to label offset, elevation, instantaneous grade, and many other properties.

Minor Offset Labels

These are the same as major offset labels except they are created at a smaller increment and must exist as a child of the major offset labels.

Segment Labels

You use this label type to label the grade, length, and other properties of the line segments that make up the section.

Grade Break Labels

You use this label type to label the offset, elevation, and other properties of grade breaks—the locations where segments meet.

The first two types are created at increments, so they are spaced evenly across the section. The last two are created at individual components of the section, so they are placed wherever these components exist. Because sections sometimes have many short segments, you can configure the label sets to skip points that are close together to prevent labels from overlapping.

To apply section labels to a section, follow these steps:

The Exercise File can be downloaded at the end of the article  

1. Open the drawing named Applying Section Labels.dwg located in the Chapter 11 class data folder. Here you see the same three section views from the previous exercise. The section view styles have been modified a bit to create some extra space beneath the sections.

2. Click the rock section on the lowest section view, and then click Edit Section Labels on the ribbon.
3. In the Section Labels – Rock dialog box, do the following:
   1. For Type, select Grade Breaks.
   2. For Section Grade Break Label Style, select Rock.
   3. Click Add
   4. For Dim Anchor Opt, select Graph View Bottom.
   5. For Dim Anchor Val, enter 0.
   6. Click OK.

Anchors Aweigh

In the previous step, you adjusted two settings relating to anchors. The concept of anchors is unique to certain types of labels that appear in section views and profile views. As a label style is composed, certain key points can be located at an anchor point whose location will be determined at the time the label is applied. This gives you some additional control over the placement of the labels. For example, in the previous steps, you specified that the labels should be aligned to the bottom of the grid by assigning Graph View Bottom as the Dim Anchor Opt setting. The Dim Anchor Val setting is an offset from the anchor point, which enables you to fine-tune the position of the label even more. An easy way to find out whether a label style that you have selected can respond to anchors is to look for a second grip. When initially created, this grip will be located where the anchor options specify. The grip can be moved to a location of your choice, providing even more flexibility with label placement.

4. With the options that you have selected, only three labels appear. It would be better to increase the number of labels to include more points along the section. In the next two steps, you will adjust the Weeding setting to provide more labels.

5. Press Esc to clear the selection from the previous step. Click one of the labels, and then click Edit Label Group on the ribbon.
6. In the Weeding column, change the value to 5 (2). Click OK. As shown in Figure 11.2, more labels appear because the weeding setting allows the space between the labels to be as small as 5 feet (2 meters) rather than 100 feet (25 meters).

   Figure 11.2  A label set has been applied to the rock section to provide information about the elevations of the rock layer.

7. Apply the same labels to the rock section in the other two section views.

Download Exercise File :

• C11 - Applying Section Labels - Metric     --- ( 1.88 MB )
• C11 - Applying Section Labels - Imperial  --- ( 1.6 MB )