In preparing site plans and performing construction site design, a number of time-saving plotting and drafting utilities have been identified and implemented in this single MDL application.  Utilities provided include a capability for easily constructing line breaks, centerlines, intersection breaks, right-of-way annotation, bubble connectors, and bubble titles.  Additional capabilities include a line extender for cut/fill annotation, and a simple xy plot utility.  Each of these capabilities is described briefly in the following paragraphs.

            Line breaks and centerlines can either be constructed or placed within existing elements.  The size of the line break symbol is determined by the text size.  Spacing for the centerline symbols is specified on the interface form.

            Right-of-Way annotation reads a standard right-of-way stationing file generated by InRoads to drive the MicroStation windowing display, eliminating the need to manually zoom in to a station, annotate it, zoom out to find the next station, and then zoom in to it.  This utility automatically performs a panning action to move to each station at whatever level of zoom is specified by the user.  The interface form allows baseline station annotation to be performed either in-line, horizontally, or at an interactively specified angle.  The station name and elevation are read from the stationing file.

            Bubble connectors and bubble titles can easily be constructed and placed using controls provided by the utilities interface.  The bubble symbols comply with Corps standards for Type 1, 2, and 3 sections, elevations, and details.  The symbol type is determined by an option pull-down list.  The category (Type 1, 2, or 3) is determined by which fields (i.e. Section, Shown On, Cut On) are filled in.

            A line extender capability is available for easily generating cut and fill lines.  MicroStation provides a simple similar capability with it’s extend line to intersection capability.  The MDL application allows an element to be selected which is the line to extend to.  Then, as each intersecting line is selected it is automatically extended and the cut or fill symbol is placed on the end of the line.

            A simple xy plot utility allows non-geographically referenced data to be easily graphed in arbitrary x,y coordinates in the design file for plotting.  Although this utility is easy to use, it provides tremendous flexibility for specifying the symbology and attributes of the data plotted, axis titles, labels, etc.  All of these attributes and symbology can be saved to ASCII files for later recall when again plotting similar data.  When the data is displayed, an interface form is shown which allows the data to be modified, or additional data points to be inserted, deleted, or appended.

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