ORD - Easy way change part of the annotation?

Hi,

I have a question regarding annotation and how flexible it is.

For example stationing. Depending on the amount of tracks or situation i would like to have ticks and text on the right side of the track center, the text on the left side or if I have lots of tracks I'd like to only have ticks and no text. At the design I don't know this yet and it may also change during the different kind of deliveries (internal and external).

Is the easiest way to constantly change the feature definition or is there a simpler and smarter way? (I would not like to delete objects or turn of any levels. That is not a smart way.)
If I need to always have different feature definition it will result on loads and loads of feature definition / feature  symbologies / annotation groups for all the different looks and annotations we could possible need. Exponential.

Thanks,
Andreas

  • If you need different styles of annotation and assuming you don't want to change parameters at each time you annotate, you must have different settings stored and available on demand. The way it is done actually is using feature definition.

    It is easy and fast to copy/paste one that is being used in your project and name it like the track you want to assign to (track1, track2, etc.) or the type of annotation you want to produce with this feature definition (type1, type2, ...). I mean that you don't need to create all of them in a dgnlib. By the way, the additional benefit is that you can turn on/off any track using the feature definition, but keep the same level for all of them.

    What you need in the dgnlib is the annotation groups to produce the annotations you want. This to give consistency across the different projects and not something you change in each design file, what is also possible, like feature definitions. Annotation Definition can also be created with copy/paste so not too painful to have different types of annotation ready to use.

    So in the feature definition you should only have to choose the appropriate annotation group, you can change if required for different outputs.
    The good thing is that once you've setup what you want for each track it is done for the project.

    An improvement that has been requested and that could help a lot is the ability to have different scales per annotation group. Typically interval of annotation won't be the same at 1:200 than 1:5000. Actually, one workaround is to use level  per scale. To my point of view worse than having a feature definition per track when we want to have one style of annotation per track;



  • Thank you for the answer and that is exactly the way I would like it work but as far as I know you can't choose Annotation Group in the Feature Definition. It is specified only in the Feature Symbologies see the screen dumps below.

    Or have I misunderstood something?

    Properties for feature Definition:

    Properties for Feature Symbologies:

  • Hi Andreas, 

    If you make different annotation groups you can easily add these to you specific feature style as I've done for Left and Right track annotations.

    if you need more info you know where to find me Slight smile

    //Christiaan

  • It doesn't seem that I'm clear enough on my question.
    I know how to build up everything with element templates, text favorites, annotation groups, feature symbologies and feature definitions. I just found it limiting in some parts or the design process.

    Let's say I have 5 different annotation groups and I also have 5 different track centers with different attributes, let's say levels, (for example existing, new, future, tear down, alternative). Only these combinations makes 25 different feature symbologies . If we can't be more flexible than this then it will be lot's of work with the settings.

    But Jean-Pierre wrote, if I understood him correctly, that we could change annotation group in feature Definition directly and that would be awesome. But maybe I did misunderstood him?

  • Unfortunately, I was wrong in my answer. Only turnouts have the annotation group set in the feature definition.

    An alternative sometimes is to use items and display style based on item property. it allows to change the symbology (not the level) based on the property. Example: set a property status with value such as new, existing, future, ... Then we can set a display style to say if status = new, color=black if status=future then color=red, ...

    By the way, considering the 25 combinations, maybe we can suggest an enhancement to allow symbology or annotation group overrides for objects such as we have for terrain model. But for terrain model it is the template that is changed. So little different.