Profile View Stationing

Often times when we try to use a profile view with exacting numbers we get something that looks all jumbled up at the end of the profile view like this:

Now we obviously don’t wan that. So to fix this we have to ditch the profile view style and use a profile view band instead. So the first step is to turn off the major and/or minor station labels for the bottom of the profile view.

Instead we want to use Bands to show the station information at the bottom of the profile view. Then we can set up the Band Style to show the major and minor station values. In the Profile View Properties there is an option to turn off the End Station Value.

Then we get a profile view that doesn’t show the end station value and removes the overlap.

Here is a link to a sample drawing.

Word Paste as Text

Often times I’m copying from a webpage or from another document I want to only include text. In the past I’ve created my own Macro and then created a keyboard shortcut to the macro.

I recently found an easier way to this without the macro. To do this go to the File button and choose Options. From the Word Options dialog box choose Customize Ribbon.

Then press the Customize Button. From the Categories column select All Commands and in the Commands column select PasteTextOnly.

Type your new shortcut in the Press new shortcut key and then press Assign to add it to the list. I’ve used Ctrl + Shift + V as my shortcut, but you can use what your preference. I’d avoid the standard Word shortcuts. Then Press Close and then you can use the keyboard sequence to paste as text.

Upgrading Civil 3D

Sometimes upgrading doesn’t go as planned. I recently tried to use Civil 3D 2017 and I was unable to change the annotation scale. It froze and wouldn’t come back. The reason why is that it was waiting for an upgrade dialog box to say OK. Since it doesn’t show in the UI I was unable to press it. To get everything back to normal I ran the RecoverAll on the drawing. This processed both the drawing and all of the XREFs. All of the drawings are saved as well as having the dialog box pop up where I can press the OK button.

Plotting Stuff

Well, I’ve been told writing stuff down and explaining stuff makes things easier to remember. So the point of this blog post is so I remember most of the stuff in it.

So I was on the phone with an architect and he mentioned the numerous yellow boxes around the text in my newly created PDF. Now I know from experience they don’t have any negative downsides and when printed again the yellow boxes go away. But I realized I didn’t have a good reason to explain why those yellow boxes are there. So I decided to find out the reason why.

Well it turns out people wanted searchable text in PDFs. The main reason AutoCAD to PDFs are not searchable are due to a design decision from a long time ago about how to create fancy text in AutoCAD using SHX fonts. The fonts aren’t actual fonts, but a representation of fonts using stuff. So to make things searchable Autodesk could have removed support for SHX files or come up with another solution. The solution Autodesk came up with is to add comments to all of the SHX text as the actual text. This way the PDF is searchable through the comments and the text shows up as it has been historically.

So if you want searchable text without the yellow boxes then you’ll want to use True Type Fonts since PDFs can render them as long as the font is loaded into the machine. So if you don’t care about the searchable text you can turn off the feature by setting the system variable EPDFSHX to 0. Not this is only available on AutoCAD 2016 Service Pack 1 and above. In 2017 a new system vairable PDFSHX was added to AutoCAD.

This knowledge Network Article has more info.

In other news HP celebrated it’s 25th Anniversary with SPAN Architects, one of the principles received the first HP large format printer to in 1991.

Profile Tangent At MidPoint

Sometimes a profile is split across section views. This may mean if we label a tangent at the midpoint it might disappear from view. In order to get it to show up we can use some magic of not showing a label segment.

So create a line label segment and set it to start at the Anchor Tangent Start and end at the Anchor Tangent End In View. Then set the Visibility to False. Note that the order does not matter.

Then go to the Grade component and anchor it to the middle of the hidden line. Now the label will stay at the midpoint of the tangent shown in the view.

Here is a link to a sample drawing.