Another Round with Dragged State Labels

Yesterday, while at a customer's office I noticed something that I had not seen before when it comes to dragged state labels, with points anyway. Take a look at the image below. I have created to random points in a drawing with the Point Marker Style for each set to Basic and the Point Label Styles are Point#-Elevation-Description and a style the I created with the coordinate information in it.

So, as you can see I have changed the colors of the text and added the coordinates. But then we looked at the dragged state for the point with the OOTB Point#-Elevation-Description Label Style. I was showing the customer how the label reacted when it was dragged out from the point. The customer asked the obvious question about the location of the leader in the dragged state and wanted the leader attached to the middle of the top line of text. This is where something interesting happened. When I changed the display of the dragged state from "As Composed" to "Stacked Text", the elements of the labels where rearranged. I had not noticed this in previous versions and that was probably because I typically used the Dragged State in the As Composed display mode.

I started digging in to see if I could deduce what had happened. The conclusion that I came to was that the Stacked Text display mode uses the order in which the label components are created. The next screen capture will show what I mean.

You will notice here that the component names are listed in the following order: Point Description, Point Number and Point Elev. And looking back at the label in a dragged state with the display mode set to "Stacked Text" we see that the label has been adjusted to match the order shown in the Label Style Composer.

To prove my theorem, I created a style the contained the same information and added the coordinate data. I was careful that I created the label components in the order that I wanted them to be displayed in the stacked text display mode. The result was as expected.

As you can see from the shot above, the the dragged state is what we would expect in a point label of this variety. Sometimes it is the little nuances of Civil 3D that make you go hhhmmmm.