Annotative Baseline Stationing and Annotations

I have not found SS4 to acknowledge Annotation Scale at this time. It either doesn't have that capability, or I haven't found that setting yet.
This renders our standard text styles useless with SS4, and requires workarounds similar to what you describe (or just placing all that text into every sheet every time).

Unfortunatly, that is what I thought.  However, I do think GEOPAK and MX both have the ability to do annotative labeling as long as the feature style has been set up correctly for the different annotation scales.  InRoads for whatever reason does not appear to have this capability which is quite frustrating and does not make sense to me.

The problem with Annotation Scale is crowding. Linear annotations, like Stationing might scale OK for scales less than 1"=100', but greater scales will be too crowded using the same spacing. And get above 1"=500' and the same thing happens with wider label spacing. Area labels are also effected by crowding. A label for an area of woods might be needed every 300' for one scale, but only every 500' for another and even greater spacing for even larger scales.

AutoCAD allows you to set a range of scales for labels so that as scales increase, fewer labels appear. But their stationing labels for Civil 3D have the same problem. The ticks, offsets and text scale correctly but eventually are too crowded as the scales increase. These is currently no automatic fix. You have to create annotation styles for ranges of scales and manually swap them as the scales change between those ranges.  

The problem with Annotation Scale is crowding. Linear annotations, like Stationing might scale OK for scales less than 1"=100', but greater scales will be too crowded using the same spacing. And get above 1"=500' and the same thing happens with wider label spacing. Area labels are also effected by crowding. A label for an area of woods might be needed every 300' for one scale, but only every 500' for another and even greater spacing for even larger scales.

AutoCAD allows you to set a range of scales for labels so that as scales increase, fewer labels appear. But their stationing labels for Civil 3D have the same problem. The ticks, offsets and text scale correctly but eventually are too crowded as the scales increase. These is currently no automatic fix. You have to create annotation styles for ranges of scales and manually swap them as the scales change between those ranges.  

Chuck,

Thank you for your input and I very much do understand your point for the need to have different styles based on the scale you are annotating.  As I mentioned, the way we do our baseline stationing and annotation now using InRoads SS2 is to have the different preferences set up for and additionally have different levels in our baseline file for the various scales.  I don't really like this because this stationing/anotation is not technically dynamic and physically tied to the baseline, therefore, if/when the geometry changes you have to go through and manually update the stationing for each of the baseline scales, which can be very tedious and be prone to errors if someone forgets to update a scale level. 

I started looking and working with InRoads SS4 and I actually thing this issue becomes more difficult with creating stationing and annotations for multiple scales.  The reason I say this because with SS4, it appears that stationing/annotation of a baseline is applied by assigning a style parameter to the baseline element that has the stationing/annotation preferences assigned to it.  The issue here is that when you assign thay style, the stationing/annotation is placed at the scale set in the inroads preference, but when it's placed, it is tied to the baseline and will update/change when the baseline changes.  Unlike terrain, you cannot override the display style of a baseline element (or at least not that I have found) therefore I am not sure how you can use the same baseline but have different stationing/annotation scales?  If you could set up separate styles and be able to override the baseline style when you reference it into another file then I think that would work. I think then the only other way then is to export the baseline back out to the native .alg format and station/annotate the way we have been, however, this then seems to remove the dynamic capabilites of the baseline which is very benificial..... I wish Bently had suggestions/best practices for handling this.  I may have to give them a call and see if they can suggest a better workflow for this.

The issue of scaling annotations has been with us for a long time...you're right - the annotation shown on a 1" = 20' sheet doesn't look good at all when scaled up for a 1" = 100' sheet. Like you say, it's NOT just text size - it's placement, frequency, location. Annotation Scale does help some, but it isn't the whole solution.

Our solution has been to just place all text in the individual sheets. That definitely comes with its own challenges of keeping information up-to-date, but it does address scaling and placement - and the ability to move items around as sheets get more crowded without messing up the display on any other sheet. I've seen plenty of other approaches to this problem, and they all have their strong points and weaknesses.

I'm not sure that COULD be a programmatic solution to this sort of problem. Legible plan sheet drafting still remains just a little bit of an art form, and you can't "program" art.

I'm always open to hear other people's answers to the riddle!