Doing Lines

A few handy line variables to know:

LTSCALE - This is very straightforward. LTSCALE set to 1 draws your lines as defined in the *.LIN file. LTSCALE set to 0.5 makes it half as big. LTSCALE of 2 makes it twice as big and so on. This is a drawing-wide setting. If you change LTSCALE, all your lines will adjust accordingly, unless you've set the LTSCALE by object or if you used CELTSCALE.

CELTSCALE - Similar to LTSCALE, but does not affect lines that have already been created. Think of it as an alternative to setting line scale by object. Say you set your LTSCALE to 1, draw a bunch of stuff, and then need to draw more stuff with an LTSCALE of 10. But you don't want to whack out the stuff you already drew. Set CELTSCALE to 10 (leave LTSCALE alone) and draw your new stuff.

PSLTSCALE - you want this to be 1, which means the viewport scale will effect the scale of the lines. With this set to 0, your lines will look the same in paperspace as in modelspace, regardless of the viewport scale.

PLINEGEN - AKA "Linetype generation." By default this is zero, meaning that if a line segment is too short to show dashes, it will appear solid. What is happening is that CAD sees the short segment and starts the pattern over, centering the pattern at the midpoint of the segment. If you don't like that, you can set your PLINEGEN variable to 0, where CAD doesn't start over at each segment. In Civil 3D 2009 and earlier this comes into play when creating existing ground profiles (in Civil 3D 2010, profiles always act like PLINEGEN = 1).

PLINEGEN=0





PLINEGEN=1