Object and Label Styles

Styles control the display and design characteristics of drawing objects.

You can use styles to efficiently manage object appearance. When you create a new object, you can apply a predefined style for its display. Later, you can apply a different style. Also, you can create new styles to suit the needs of different users and different project stages. If you change a style definition, the changes are applied automatically to all objects using that style.

The object styles in AutoCAD Civil 3D have general attributes, such as object color, visibility of components, linetypes, and fill patterns.

Similarly, label styles work with text format, data content, location, and graphic elements, such as leader lines and bounding boxes.

Within your design process, object and label styles should be created with specific purposes in mind, such as representing objects at different approval stages, or displaying the right information for different types of users. Before you create object styles, experiment with editing styles for different objects to learn the available controls.

Styles for each object type are managed on the ToolspaceSettings tab. The General collection contains styles that can be used by more than one object type (called Multipurpose styles) as well as shared label styles. All AutoCAD Civil 3D objects have a Basic style that can be used as is, or as the basis for building new styles. If you want to customize some attributes of a style, you can create a new style, or make changes to an existing style and save it with a new name. Groups of styles can be collected and saved as a drawing template (.dwt) file. All drawings created from a specific .dwt will share the same styles. The controls for creating styles are standardized as much as possible across all features to make the process easier.

For objects, you can add labels by using the Annotate tab to access the Add Labels dialog box or feature-specific label menus.

You can create sets of label styles for alignments, profiles, and sections in order to manage multiple labels easily. After the set is defined, it can be applied to or removed from an object in a single operation.

Tutorial: Changing the Display of an Object

Styles Best Practices

Topics in this section

• Working with Styles

  Use the object context menus tocreate new object styles or edit existing styles.

• Changing Common Settings in Styles

  The Styles dialog boxes for all object types include the Information, Display, and Summary tabs. Other tabs are provided to record additional data specific to the object type.