Reverse a Polyline with text in AutoCAD

Probably my favorite entity in AutoCAD is the polyline. However, there have been a few things that I've found somewhat annoying, one of which is controlling the direction of polylines.

Normally the direction of polylines makes little difference, but for some purposes it can be important, linetype text is oriented in line with the direction of the line segment, so if the polyline flows from right to left, as opposed to left to right the text will appear upside down. as shown in the figures.

Reversing the vertices in a polyline has historically been around since 2010, but I hear a lot of people today ask about the upside down text and how to fix it. Simply enter the REVERSE command by either typing it, or selecting it from the Home ribbon, and select the polyline you want to reverse.

This command can also be used on a few other entities, namely LINE, SPLINE, and HELIX entities.

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Swap Multiple Parts in Civil 3D

You have just finished a lengthy drainage design and the reviewer wants you to change out some structures to a certain type and have you change a pipe size on 10 pipes to a size bigger well that is easy now with our own FDOT tool called swap parts. Out of the box Civil 3D only allows you to swap one part at a time. So in this case we will launch the Swap Parts located on the FDOT Ribbon.

After Selecting all of the structures and pipes you need to change press enter and the swap parts dialog parts box pops up. It populates with the current parts list that you are using, which in this case is the FDOT Drainage parts list. Make all of your edits and select ok. Presto… all of your structures and pipes change.

You can find our State Kit for Civil 3D 2012 here. We should have a beta version out in June of the state kit for AutoCAD Civil 3D 2014.

http://www.dot.state.fl.us/ecso/downloads/publications/civil3dworkflows/