Annotation Text Movement

Is there a way to prevent annotative text (stations, curve data, ect.) from moving? We often need to move or rotate text so our plans are presentable, but the annotation tends to move back to a default position.

  • Paul:

    The text should only move back if you re-annotate the alignment, and should stay where you put it as long as you do not do such. Is it acting differently? As well, I would like to know if there is a manner to "lock" the annotation so that even re-annotating an alignment will not cause the text to change placement. Anyone out here know if such a tool is available? 

    Mark

    Mark Anthony Plum
    Chief Technology Officer
    1601 N.W. Expressway, Suite 400
    Oklahoma City, OK  73118
     
  • I could have sworn I had posted something about this and gotten an SR during our last submission, but I don't see anything in my records.

    This issue presented itself when we were working with profile annotation. We had to copy a bunch of Grade Percentages on different points of the profile to match with sheets. Locations reset themselves not just after removing annotation and reapplying annotation, but also when we tweaked our profile. In addition, any of the Text Favorites/Annotation Cells that we copied from their original location lost their association with the profile and just displayed "LinearAnnotation.PositionX" or whatever property it was referencing. At that time, I had tried your suggestion of Locking each element we didn't want to update, but that did not make any difference.

    As of right now, I am not aware of any method of disassociating annotation cells, or dropping fields to plain text, or any other method to prevent this from happening.

    The use of Named Boundaries would probably resolve this issue, however our project has variable profile limits to match our plan boundaries, which were not created using the "Named Boundaries from Polygon" tool, and we didn't have the time to implement all of that. We are trying to implement use of Named Boundaries with our Cross Section development, and its going pretty well so far. Even then, I'm not sure how all of that would work with profile annotation, but will probably experiment with it in the future.

    Edit: I wrote it up in our lesson's learned doc, but I don't think it ever made it to the forums or via SR:

    "

    1. In our plan and profile workflows, one horizontal baseline would be represented on multiple plan sheets. In addition, one vertical profile would be represented on multiple profile sheets, all referencing the same profile drawing model. Because of this, it was required that we copy and paste Annotation Cells multiple times along the baseline or profile in order to have that annotation appear on each sheet where the baseline or profile was represented. This worked fine unless the plan or profile were adjusted after this copying of annotation took place (which happened a lot, as we were making last minute design decisions through the plans production process). When this happened, any Annotation Cell copied from its original position broke association with the baseline or profile which it was originally copied from. The result of this was that, if the Annotation Cell contained a Text Favorite which referenced a property using a field, the Text Favorite would then display the Property Name of the Text Favorite, and not the value. This would require deletion of the orphaned Annotation Cells and copying the new values. If “Remove Model Annotation” were used as a means to expedite this cleanup in the profile drawing model, “Annotate Model” would not annotate the profile drawing model. As an enhancement, we would like to see the plan and profile annotation persist through design changes. As a defect, the “Annotate Model” tool should successfully re-annotate the profile. See “Noted Defects”, below. There are two ways that this phenomena could be mitigated without a software re-release:
      1. A tool that allows the user to select the Annotation Cells in a Profile Drawing model and both drop the Annotation Cell to plain text using “Drop Element – Complex”. Currently, Select By Level does not function inside Drawing Models.
      2. A macro that takes all fields in a design or drawing model and drops the field while retaining the text inside that field."
  • An excellent, thoughtful narrative, Robert. With new technologies always seem to come new issues :-)

    Mark

    Mark Anthony Plum
    Chief Technology Officer
    1601 N.W. Expressway, Suite 400
    Oklahoma City, OK  73118
     
  • I logged this defect last year: Defect 1032959:[Drawing Production] Profile annotations reverting back to initial position when moved

    Currently it's still in the backlog, not yet approved by the Product Manager with no timeline but it's defined as critical.