Tutorial 13

In this Tutorial you will learn how to;

¨ Enter Cross Sections from Level Sheets containing Chainage, Offset and Reduced Level.

¨ Review the Profile of the Centreline and Cross Sections on screen

¨ Plot out a Profile of the Centreline and Cross Sections.

Use Start, Programs, or a shortcut if you have one to start Ezicad_Premium.

Pull down the File menu, select New, and enter a JobID of ‘Tutorial13’, and a description indicating it is data for Tutorial 13.

Entering the Data

Click here to see or print the data for this tutorial.

Pull down the Entry menu and select the Reduced Levels option. A screen similar to that below will appear

Pick the New button to indicate that you need a new level sheet.

You will be asked to specify the road number for the level sheet, and can simply press the Enter key to accept the default value of Road 1 that is offered.

A screen similar to that below will appear, and once you press Enter to lock away the ‘rd1’ entry on the first line, you can start entering your data into the relevant columns, as shown in the sample screen.

Now continue entering your data until you reach the end.

Note that if you make a mistake you can use the mouse or the Tab and Shifted Tab keys to move back to the relevant field and make the necessary alteration.

Remember that in this entry table, as in all other entry tables offered in Ezicad, you use either the Tab key, the Enter key or your mouse to move between fields, and you use your arrow keys to move within a field, in combination with the Backspace or Delete keys to make the changes you require.

Once you have finished entering the data, you can use the File menu to access the Print Preview and Print option if you require a hard copy of the entered data.

The next step is to store the entered data into the database, so pull down the Options menu in the entry screen and select Store data to database.

A screen will appear to allow you to control the extent of the data that you store, but in this case you wish to store all the points that is the default.

Simply pick the OK button, and the points will be stored for you.

We now wish to close down the entry screen, so use File, Close, or the close “X” at the top of the window, and answer Yes when asked if you wish to save changes to the level sheet.

At this stage you will see a ‘blank’ plan view screen.

If you press Z for zoom, followed by E for extents, the screen should now appear as seen at left.

Now, before proceeding, we need to explain how these points have ‘magically’ obtained coordinates when all you entered for this example were chainages, offsets and levels.

Since the Plan View screen is designed to show coordinates, we have allocated some ‘temporary coordinates’ to all the points you entered into the level sheet, so that you can see a picture of the sections.

At this stage of proceedings we have no information about the alignment that these chainages and offsets might be following, so we have assumed that they are along a perfectly straight section of road going from west to east, and provided coordinates accordingly.

Later in these tutorials you will learn how to assign these points to an alignment and so calculate relevant coordinates for them.

Until then, all we are really interested in is profiles and sections of the points, and these can be easily achieved with the values we have.

Before we can plot the profiles and sections we need to do a small amount of ‘housekeeping’ to assign all these points to a format which will allow speedy plotting.

In Ezicad_Premium, each ‘profile’ needs to be represented by a string, and any points that which you wish to have plotted on sections associated with that profile need to be ‘associated’ with the string.

Here we wish to create a ‘string’ or an alignment if you like to think of it in those terms through the points that are on the centre of the sections we entered.

To do this, pull down the Road Menu, select Utilities, followed by ‘String points together’. The following screen will appear.

Enter a Road Number of 1.

Enter a String folder of Road and a String Id of CL1 to identify this as the centreline of road 1.

If you wish to assign colours and linetypes you may do so, but it is not important at this stage.

Click on OK, and when the ‘pop-up box’ disappears press D to redraw the Screen.

You will now see a string along the centreline of your sections.

Now pull down Strings followed by Select, and choose Single String Selection. Click on the string to select it.

Next you need to select the points that you wish to ‘associate’ with this alignment string.

In this particular case you need to associate all the points in the job with the one string, but this will mostly not be the case in real work.

Here you need to pull down the Points menu, choose Select, followed by Select All.

Now pull down the Road Menu, choose Utilities and then choose Attach Points to Strings.

Make sure your centerline string is still highlighted to indicate that it is selected.

Now click on the ‘big green P’ . This ‘Icon’ represents Profile and gives you quick access to the method of defining which profile or profiles you are interested in seeing. Choose the button titled ‘Replace with Selected Strings’. You will see a screen similar to that at left.

Next, click on the ‘CS Reference’ Tab and again choose ‘Replace with Selected Strings’ to indicate that the ‘reference’, or natural sections you want are those that have been attached to the String named ‘cl1’ in the folder ‘road’

When both these screens have been updated, click OK to end.

If you now click on the ‘Profile Icon’ you will either see a blank screen, or a rather dramatic looking profile appear, similar to that in the screen below. If you see a blank screen, don’t panic, just press Z followed by E to zoom to the extents of the profile screen, and then you should see the screen.

Next Click on the Section Icon, and you will see cross section of Chainage 840 displayed.

Now Pull down the Window Menu and select Tile Roadworks to see a screen like that shown below with concurrent views of Plan, Profile and Section.

If you take a little bit of time to make each window active in turn (simply by clicking in it) and then watching the adjacent windows as you move your cursor around, you will see that all 3 windows ‘track’ interactively.

Note also that at the bottom of the display, the second bottom line contains two fields that will change as you move your cursor around in the active window.

If your cursor is in the Section window, the field on the left will display the Offset of the cursor, and the field on the right will contain the RL of the cursor.

If you have the cursor in the Profile window, the field on the left will display the Chainage of the cursor, and the field on the right will contain the RL of the cursor.

And you would already be aware that if you are in the Plan window you would be tracking the coordinates.

Setting up the Printer/Plotter

Now that you have managed to get the data to display section and a profile, it is time to get ready to plot out both of these items, but before you can proceed you need to make sure that the plotter you intend to use is configured as the current Windows printing device.

Normally most windows systems have a small laser or inkjet printer configured as the default print device, and this is fine for most of the time, but now we wish to plot on a A1 sheet, not a small A4 or letter sheet.

Pull down the File menu, and choose Print Setup. Now you need to pull down the list of installed printers and select your plotter.

Since we have no idea what equipment you are likely to have installed, but the computer this tutorial was written on has a Canon LBP4i set as its default printer, and a plotter driver for the HP350C is also installed, so we will illustrate with those names.

You will need to substitute whatever equipment you have, and in the screen at right we are in the process of selecting the HP350C to be selected as the current printer in place of the existing Cannon printer.

Note that using this process does NOT replace the default printer.

It simply sets the printer selected to be the current printer until the program is finished, and this is normally what we want.

If you wish to change the default printer each time, or indulge in some other form of techno wizardry feel free, so long as you get a device with an A1 sheet of paper as your current printing device at this point in time.

Once you have selected the relevant plotter, you then need to select the Properties tab to allow you top set the plotter up.

In the screen at left we have used the plotter driver to select an A1 sheet of paper with a Landscape orientation, and we suggest that you need to do the same.

Please note that there are a variety of other settings concerned with roll feeds or communications ports or paper types that you also need to have correctly set if you are to achieve a sensible plot.

However it is beyond the scope of this tutorial to deal with all of these items and you will need to rely on your own training or local expert to guide you in these areas.

Once you have set the plotter to use some A1 paper in landscape mode you should close the Print Setup option, and ensure that the Profile window is Active.

Set Profile Parameters & Plot

Next you need to call up the Profile parameters, which can be done by selecting the Icon which shows an “P” for “Profile” with a pencil growing out of it. Alternatively, you can pull down the Road menu and select Display & Plotting, followed by the Profile parameters option.

Either way, the screen shown at left should appear.

Click the box titles “Min” and you will see that the minimum chainage of 840 replaces the default of 0.

Click the Max box and the maximum chainage (1440) of the current road will be inserted.

The remainder of the defaults look fine for the moment, so select OK to save the parameters away.

Next make sure that the Profile Window is active i.e it is the one with the solid bar at the top.

Now pull down the File menu and select Print Preview.

If everything has gone according to plan, the screen should appear similar to the one you can see to the left.

If your screen does not resemble the one shown then you should back track through the tutorial to discover what you have set differently to what is written here.

Now if you are impatient, you might be inclined to hit the Print button to get the plotter moving, but before you do that, we have a little bit of tinkering to do to get the plot a little more finished.

If you look closely in the bottom left of the plot, you will see two boxes that do not have a label to indicate what the figures represent, and we also have a ‘third’ box’ which has no figures in it, so we best rectify this before we waste a sheet of paper.

Close the Print Preview window, and we will look at fixing the third box.

Basically Ezicad_Premium assumes that you will be entering Design Vertical Information for each profile that you draw, so it turns on a ‘box’ in the plot parameters to incorporate that information.

In this particular instance we only wish to plot the ‘Natural Surface Profile’ and have no design to enter, so we need to turn off that particular Design Line, and its accompanying ‘box’ on the profile.

To do this, make sure you have the Profile Window highlighted, and then ‘right click’ inside it to bring up the ‘Design Menu” as seen in the screen above.

You need to keep in mind that there are two separate places where you define ‘Plot Parameters’ in Ezicad;

1. in the general Profile Plot Parameters accessed by the ‘P with a pencil’, which controls the overall range, scaling, format, labels, etc of the whole profile plot.

2. here on the ‘right button menu’ which controls location, colour line type etc of the individual profile.

Now select the very bottom option called Plot parameters, and you will see the following screen.

On the second line you will see that both “Reference On” and ‘Design On’ are ticked. Untick the ‘Design’ field because we will not be doing any design on this job.

Close this screen and then do a Print Preview again, and this time you will see that there are only two ‘boxes’ along the bottom of the profile, which is what we want.

Now we need to decide what ‘Labels’ to put in the two boxes that we are left with.

Choose Profile Plot Parameters again (the P with the Pencil) and this time when the screen appears select the “Format” button at the bottom of the screen, and a screen similar to that shown right will appear.

Your aim is to insert the labels “Chainage” in the field on the right of line 1, and “Natural Surface” in the label field on line 2 to make it appear identical to the screen above.

If you are in an adventurous frame of mind, you may wish to play with the font settings, and choose a different font, colour and size, and we will leave it to you to discover the hours of fun which can be had trying different combinations.

If you select the “Font” box between Chainage and the black square, the Font screen will appear and provide a gateway to your artistic leanings.

For this exercise, we are happy with the default font, so close down your parameter screens and then pull down the File menu, and again select Print Preview.

This time the profile will again appear, and if you use the magnifying tool in the boxes at the left of the profile you should see something very similar to the screen below.

Once you are ready, you may now commit this profile to the plotter, either directly from the Print Preview window, or by pulling down the File menu and selecting Print.

You should note that the File menu also contains options to Export the profile either to and Autocadä compatible DWG file, or alternatively to a DXF file to transfer to other CAD packages.

Cross Section Parameters & Plotting

Now that it is time to deal with the cross sections, the first thing to do is to make the Section window active.

Next you need to access the Cross Section parameters, either from the Road, Display & Plotting Menu, or by selecting the Icon which is an “X” (for x sections) with a pencil attached.

Select the “Min” and “Max” in turn to insert the minimum and maximum chainage values into the relevant fields.

Next, we know that the client requires the sections to be plotted at a scale of 1:200 natural (ie. same horizontal and vertical scales), so set 200 on both scale fields.

Next close the parameter screen and pull down the File menu to select Print Preview. Your screen should appear similar to the one displayed below.

If it doesn’t, and the sections appear to overlap, you are obviously using different scales or paper dimensions to the ones I used.

If this is the case, you need to close the preview screen and go back to your section parameter screen where you can change the number of rows and/or columns .

Since there are as many different solutions as there are Surveyors and Engineers, we leave it to you to decide on a set of parameters that meets with your approval to produce a plot.