ORD - Easy way change part of the annotation?

Question

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

jpln · Answer

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;

Christiaan Post · Answer

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 
 //Christiaan