Tutorial 4

In this tutorial you will learn how to

¨ assign strings to ‘layers’

¨ use ‘layers’ to plot solid colors in closed strings

¨ use layers to specify which attributes are plotted on strings

Open Job “Example4.cdsdb” in your Tutor directory.

The screen should appear as shown. If it does not, try Zoom Extents to get the view you need.

To show you the first glimpse of what you can achieve, we have already allocated some of the parcels into particular layers.

Pull down the Strings menu and select String Attributes.

The screen should appear as seen at right.

You will see here that we have three layers named 0, villas and small respectively.

Don’t be too concerned about where the names came from, as the names themselves are random and of little importance.

Applying Solid Fills

As a first example of what you can do, select the “Fill Button” on the line which deals with the “villas’ layer, and you will see the box is then crossed to indicate that you want these strings to be filled in with a solid color. You can also hatch, but that will be covered later.

At this stage we will
settle for a color, so click on the solid black bar to bring up the palette of available colors.

Pick one of the green colors that takes your fancy and then click OK.

The screen will return and you will see the Fill Color of your choice is now shown.

If you now select OK, you will return to the screen that should now appear similar to that at left where you have a solid green color shown.

Obviously you could do the same thing to apply different colors to the other layers, but we have other things in store.

Specifying String Attributes to be Displayed

As well as allowing you to control what color your parcels are filled with, the attribute layer table also allows you to set the String parameters for each layer.

Select the Strings menu and again select String Attributes.

This time with Layer Name 0 highlighted, move your cursor down and turn ON String ID’s by clicking in the box.

You can also set the color of the pen and the size and font that the ID’s will be drawn in by selecting the “Change button”

The Size of the font is particularly important if you wish to be able to see things on the screen, and you need to realise that these attributes will be displayed on the screen at the same relative size that they will be plotted at.

While we don’t actually scale the screen to the particular plot scale, the String ID’s, bearings, distances and the like are all drawn at a size which shows you how they will appear relative to the plot at the scale selected on the Plot Parameters

Screen.

Perhaps it might be clearer if I demonstrate rather than describe.

Select the Change button, and set Arial font in Black at a size of 18 Points.

Now press OK to return to the job, which should appear as seen below.

If you look closely, you will see some indication of figures in the middle of some of the parcels where you would expect to see a Lot Number (or indeed a String ID as we call them).

Now pull down the File menu, select Plot parameters, and set the scale to be 1:1000. Then press OK.

The screen will now appear as below, and you should be able to make out some Lot numbers and some other String ID’s. (at least on the screen, if not on the screen dump)

Obviously since we have doubled the scale of the drawing, we have effectively halved the size of each parcel.

But the font size has remained constant so it will appear to be twice the size it was previously

Clear isn’t it.?? Don’t worry if it doesn’t lock in immediately, just give it time and think it through and the light will come on.

And it is important that the light is on, because this relativity will apply to all the attributes of either points or strings that you choose to plot onto your plans.

You can also play with turning on various combinations of the other available attributes needed to produce the various plan types you encounter.

A Note about Font Sizes.

Traditionally many surveyors and engineers have specified text heights in millimetres, but with Windows you need to specify in Point sizes.

In order to be able to convert, I should tell you that 72 points is equal to one inch, or 25.4 millimetres.

So, by a process of simple arithmetic we find that 10 points is near enough to 3.5 millimetres. Or to put it another way, if you multiply the Point size by 0.35 you will arrive at the size of the text in millimetres.

Different Layers with Different Attributes

Return to the String Attributes table and this time highlight the Layer Name “SMALL”.

Select the Fill box, and pull down and choose a Red color.

Then move down and Select the Distances box, and use Change to set a Size of 14 (which should be about 4.9 millimetres or 14/72 of an inch).

Note the “Acc” field on the right, which allows you to decide how you want distances to be shown. It defaults to 0.001 which will show distances to the millimetre, or thousandth of a foot. If you want to display distances to the nearest 100 mm , or tenth of a foot, enter 0.1, while if you want them shown to the centimeter or hundredth of a foot, enter 0.01.

When you select OK and return to the screen it should appear as shown.

Here you will have the following layers and attributes

Layer 0 – not filled and display String ID’s

layer ‘villas’ – filled in green with no attribute displayed

Layer “SMALL” – filled in red with distances displayed.

Using Layer to Show Road Centerline

If you look now at the two Road Centerlines in the job, you will see that they still belong to Layer 0, which is the default layer all strings have, unless you specify otherwise.

It is common on engineering plans to show these centerlines with the chainages of the points displayed at the half-angle, and you can achieve this as follows.

First you need to put the strings into a layer of their own.

Pull down the Strings menu, highlight Select, and then choose Single String Selection.

You will see your cursor now changes to the string selection crosshair.

Select each of the centerlines shown by ‘clicking on’ part of the line. Note that when lines/strings have curves in them you should try and click on a straight segment to make selection easier.

Once the strings have been selected, pull down the Strings menu again, and pick Alter.

A small window will pop up to allow you to alter the Pen, Linetype and Layer of all the Selected Strings.

In this case you are only interested in changing the Layer, so position your cursor in the Layer field and type in Road and then choose OK.

Now go back to your String Attributes, and this time you will see a ‘Road’ Layer is now in the table.

Highlight the name Road with your cursor

Now move down and select the box titled ‘Chain (HAO)’. (The HAO is shorthand for half angle offset).

Change your Font to be black with a font size of 14.

Note also the “Acc” field which allows you to specify how ‘accurate’ you want the Chainages displayed to appear. To show to the nearest 100mm enter 0.1

Select OK, to see the screen at right.

You will see that the chainages will most likely overwrite the details on the front boundaries of the lots, but at this stage we are only interested in showing you how to use the different features.

We make no attempt whatsoever to suggest what combinations of these features you might wish to use at any point in time.

Past experience has however shown that you would normally not try to draw an engineering plan with centerline chainages at the same time as you had distances on the boundaries, but we have given up trying to predict what people will and will not do in drawing plans.

Using Hatching.

As well as filling in closed strings with a solid color, you can also apply a hatching pattern.

If you look at your job you will see a court bowl that has a line across its entrance to close it off.

Select this string by clicking on the line across the neck of the bowl, and then Alter its layer to be ‘Bowl’

Next go back to String Attributes and highlight layer name Bowl.

Click in the hatch box, and a drop down list box appears showing the available hatch’s.

Select a hatch name of “brick” by double clicking or selecting and pressing the entry key.

Now press OK and you will see the screen as below.

The names of the standard patterns supplied with Ezicad can be found in your OnLine manual, but you can use any hatch pattern which you find which is compatible with the Autocad® standard method of hatching. The definition file describing them is found in the “variable” directory and has a name of “hatch”.

Before you complain that the hatching is not particularly dense, Zoom a window around the area of the court and you should see something like below.

Again, in this exercise I am more interested in identifying the features and showing how to get to them rather than trying to produce a perfect result.

I leave it to you to experiment with other hatch patterns and different scaling to see what you can achieve.

However, before you start to complain that the hatching facility doesn’t do what Autocad® does, let me tell you that I already know, and it was never designed to compete with a full-featured CAD package.

If you need or want more than is available, export a DWG and use a full CAD package to finish the drawing while we concentrate on the survey & engineering calculation routines that CAD packages don’t have.