scaling or replacing SS4 Lines and line strings in ORD

Here is a small piece of the disaster.  The huge text are "Notes" with a leader.  These looked good in SS4.  I can't seem to scale these back either.  When I look at the scale of a cell at 1"=40' it claims the scale is 480 (x,y,z).  Why would the scale not be 40?  I can imagine 40x12inches... but this is a US Survey Foot drawing.  Lines and line strings are showing a scale of 1.000.  At 1"=40' you can barely see the text along the lines.

Annotation scale was not originally part of MicroStation and not even in the earliest releases of V8. At many DOT's, when a feature like this gets added to MicroStation, too many projects are in the pipeline to adopt the new features. And we often do not have the resources to maintain multiple workspace standards within a large, multi-discipline agency to allow a gradual migration of new features. I've been struggling for three years to roll out an Ss4 standard that is a break from our Ss2 and earlier standard to finally enable a number of "new" features - at least to our staff, our consultants and projects.

We found, if you

1. select all linestrings, shapes, complex lines and shapes, arcs using the Element Selector and the element type tab
2. switch to the line style tab and deselect any linestyles 0-7
3. use the element info properties dialog box to change the line style scale factors to 1.0

This should fix those elements. Text is much trickier as some tools by default placed text using annotation scale and others do not. You need to isolate them and sometimes need to unscale them before applying annotation scale. Even than, text offsets from their intended location do not always scale correctly. If you look, all annotation by Open Roads create annotation cells. This allows a cell origin to define an anchor and scale about point that is not tied to any of the graphic elements that make up the annotation. This an only be done with text if you add spaces and empty lines of text to make the text origin appear to be some distance from the text and when scales, the offsets scale with the text.

We have some tools in our workspace (VBA) that try to adjust line styles when the line styles are being scaled by annotation scale and might have tools for text, but I'd have to check.   

That is their seed drawing. What about your drawing? What are your model properties for the model you are struggling with?

CaddCop is right - DOT's often end up with a mishmash of standards, developed at different times for different needs, without a lot of auditing or editing.

It sounds as if your DOT is using the scale factors the same way mine does, using a factor of 12 so that 1" = 40' is a scale factor of 480. This actually is correct because 40' is made up of 480". Yes, it's confusing and annoying, possibly not the most intuitive, but it IS correct by that logic.

I see the unit resolution in the ORD Seed File is 12000 per Survey Foot. Is that identical to your SS4 Seed File? If not, that could be part of the problem.

You also have the option to change your linestyle scale in the models dialog to a fixed factor different from your annotation scale if you choose. You can also change linestyle scales on a ByLevel basis on the Styles tab of the Level Properties dialog (accessed by right-clicking the level name in Level Manager).

Fixing Note elements is going to be hard because those NEVER behave in either version of the software.

You can scale text "about Element Center" (which as I recall is actually the justfication point). Try scaling by 0.08333 (which is 1/12) and see what difference that makes.

Things show differently in ORD because the workspace in ORD is different. ORD is not using your SS4 workspace - the support files are not the same. One more reason that things need to be kept in one or the other.

I have tried many things.  My Model is set to 1"=40'.  It claims therefore my Design scale is 480.

I have "Propagate Annotation Scale" = ON.  It seems when I toggled "Update fields Automatically, this seemed to change

linestyles.  At 1"=40' the text along the lines is unreadable.  But this could be the DOT not having them built correctly?

Not sure how I can check that.

I have another problem.  I created a cell with a circle and the word "MISC" for points that are miscellaneous code.

it is set to annotation, and scales, but now I want to edit the text.  The text is called a "TAG"  and I cannot figure out how to edit the TAG?  I used to drop the text, but then it doesn't act like a cell and has no annotation.  Are TAG's somehow editable?  I made the cell in SS2, SS3, or SS4, I can't recall.

I had to turn off annotation on the notes.  That made them semi-reasonable size, but of course they are no longer scaling with the drawing.  It seems there is no other work around there.