Tutorial 14

In this tutorial you will learn how to

¨ Obtain profiles of features other than the centreline.

¨ Use a range of Offset values to define the profile.

You should start Ezicad_Premium, either pick tutorial13.cdsdb from the Recent Job List, or use File, Open to open “Tutorial13” in the Ezicad_Premium\tutor folder.

When the job opens you will be given the plan view showing the ‘temporary coordinates’ that were assigned during Tutorial 13, and you will have lines or strings drawn along the centreline, and across each of the sections.

When you entered the data for job Tutorial13, you may or may not have noticed that there was a level taken 9 metres to the left of the centreline ( an offset of -9) and at 10 metres to the right of the centreline (an offset of 10) at most, if not all cross sections.

The reason for this is that it is proposed to erect a fence down each side of the road at these particular offsets, and the fencing contractor had asked for a profile showing both fence lines profiled against one another.

We need to create string lines for each of these fence lines.

To create the left fence, pull down the Road menu, and then select Utilities.

Select the ‘String points together’ option.

Fill in road number 1; an offset of –9 to –9 and type in (or pull down and select) a folder of “road” and an Id of “left”.

Run the option and you should have a new string running down the left fence. The right fence is created in a similar manner. For the right use folder and id of “road” and “right” respectively.

At this point your screen should appear as at left.

We wish to display the profiles for both left and right strings.

Select these two strings in the plan view. (By now you should know how to select individual strings)

Select the Icon marked with an “P” on the icon bar. This “P” refers to the “Profiles” lines, and within Ezicad, a profile by definition is a profile of points on natural surfaces.

You will see that it still shows the ‘cl1’ string that we used during the previous tutorial.

Hit the ‘Replace with Selected String’ button, and the screen should now appear as seen at left, showing that now it will profile strings ‘left’ and ‘right’

At this stage you should select the Display Profile Icon (or you could use the Road menu and select the Display & Plotting option followed by Display Profile), and you should get a screen that appears similar to that below.

If you happen to get a blank screen, don’t panic – just press Z followed by E to Zoom to the extents of the job and the screen should appear.

Providing your display appears similar to that shown, you can now proceed to prepare for plotting.

If for some reason your display does not appear as shown, go back and carefully check the Profile Parameter screens to ensure that values you have used are the same as shown.

When you are ready to proceed, ‘click’ the right mouse button while in the profile view. The screen will appear as below, and you need to select the last entry, which is Plot Parameters.

This ‘right button menu’ accesses the ‘Plot Parameters’ which define the appearance of each individual profile that you intend to plot, along with all of the options concerned with adding and modifying design vertical grading, which you will come to use in a later tutorial.

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

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

2. 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.

You will see the following screen.

Each ‘box’ you see contains the majority of the parameters which control how both the natural surface (or sometimes called reference) profile and design profile for the particular string or alignment will be drawn.

If you look at the top field in this ‘box’ you see that it is concerned with a String which it identifies as ‘road left’. When you are ready, you can use the pull down arrow at the right to choose any other string/alignment/profile in the job, however, for the moment we need to concentrate on what the remainder of the screen allows you to control.

On the next line down you see fields titled ‘Reference On’ and Design On’ which are both ticked to select them.

Ezicad assumes that you will be entering design information for each profile, but in this instance it is not the case, so you should ‘untick’ the ‘Design On’ field.

The next ‘group’ of fields lets you specify which Box Number the values for this profile will appear in, together with the colour and line type to draw it with, and whether it needs to be ‘lifted’ above its scaled location to allow clearer viewing.

First we start with ‘Box Number’, which we explain by reference to the ‘sketch’ provided below on top of page 5.

If you look at the skeleton drawing of a profile below, you will see that each value to be drawn needs to be assigned a “box number” to write the values in.

While there are many different formats in use within the Surveying/Engineering Profession, it is quite common to put the value for chainage at the bottom of the profile ie in Box 1, and then organise the other values above it, and that is what we will attempt to do here.

We will place Chainage in Box 1, (which is where it is by default), the values of the Left Fence in Box 2 and those for the Right Fence in Box 3.

Since we are currently defining the left fence and it is already shown in Box 2 no intervention is required.

The next two fields are concerned with ‘colour’ and ‘ltype’ or line type.

If you select the ‘colour’ button you will be given a palette of available colours to choose from for this particular line.

If you select the ‘ltype’ button, the following screen will appear showing some of the available line types that you can use.

You can decide whether you wish to use ‘distinctive’ colours and linetypes, and what you choose is of no particular relevance as long as you know how to choose it.

Since we do not have section or designs in this particular example, it is time to change to the other profile and set up its definition.

Go to the ‘String’ field and pull down the arrow to reveal the available profiles. Select string “road” “right”.

Untick the ‘Design On’ field.

Change the Box Number to 3, and do what you like as far as colour and line type are concerned.

At this stage I will again remind you of what you learnt a little earlier about the two distinct areas where you define the plotting parameters for profiles. We are now about to switch to the second ‘general’ area.

Select the Profile Plot Parameter Icon (that’s the P with pencil attached) or pull down the Road menu and select Display and Plotting followed by Profile parameters.

You will see that the parameters are the same as those we used when we plotted a profile of the centreline in the previous example, and since they worked there, they should be more than adequate here as well.

You will however need to alter some of the labels to be placed in the boxes, so select the Format box and the screen at right will appear.

You will see that the values are where we left them when we plotted the centreline only in the earlier tutorial.

Box 1 will still contain the Chainage values, and the label of ‘Chainage is still applicable.

Box 2 will still contain a ‘REF#’, but the label should be changed to Left Fence.

Box 3 is set to NOT USED at the moment but we need to alter that to incorporate the right fence profile.

Pull down the Arrow in the left hand column, and scroll down until you find a value called ‘REF#’.

This column tells the program which type of data it needs to consider for the particular ‘box’, and it then looks through the relevant data type to find the particular profile we have assigned to Box 3 – in this case the Right Fence.

Enter a label of ‘Right Fence’ and then select OK to close the parameter screens.

Now you are ready for a plot, but you may need to use Print Setup to make sure that you have your plotter selected with A1 paper.

Once that is done, you can obtain a Print Preview, which should appear as shown below, and if it does, you may care to plot it out on the plotter.