Importing Styles in Civil 3d

Styles management
Styles are stored in every Civil 3D drawing. There is no centralized location for styles nor is there a styles manager. One of the challenges we face is how to ensure that the appropriate styles exist in our drawings and how to modify styles and then ensure that many drawings, if not all, contain these modified styles.

Template
Let’s discuss how styles get into a drawing in the first place. The most common process involves the proper use of an AutoCAD template. WHPacific has included in Civil 3D five templates that can be considered a good starting place. We know that with the NEW and QNEW commands we are asked to specify a template from which to create a new drawing. All styles, along with all linetypes, blocks, layers, etc. present in the template will be present in the drawing.

Drag and drop
Any modification to a style in an existing drawing will exist only within that drawing. So how do we get the modified style into our other drawings? One method is to drag and drop the modified style from a collection on the Settings tab of Toolspace into the drawing window of another drawing. We can also drag and drop from the same location to the Drawing name branch within the Settings tab of the Toolspace. Both the item you want to copy and the name of the destination drawing must be visible in the Settings tree before you begin the drag-and-drop operation.

The limitation of these two methods is that we are introducing only one style at a time. We can grab many styles from the item view of the Settings tab or we can grab a collection of styles and drag and drop to the two destinations just mentioned. Both of these methods allow us to import many styles of a particular type. This drag-and-drop process also works for Description Keys and Pipe Rules. However, because there are nearly 100 "styleable" objects in Civil 3D, this process may still not be optimal.

If the drawing already contains an item with the name of the item being copied, the Duplicate Item Name dialog box is displayed. This allows you to decide how to handle the conflict.

If you drag a label style with one or more child styles from one drawing to another, only the selected style is copied into the drawing; the child styles are not copied. If you copy a child style into another drawing, the parent style is also copied.

Insert styles via block
It is recommended that you always keep a saved (.dwg) version of your custom Styles template (.dwt). This drawing version of your custom template can be easily inserted, using the typical AutoCAD insert command, into any drawing to introduce all of your custom styles. If you create any styles that you would like to have in the future and to share with others, then please copy it to: I:\Library\AutoCAD 2008\Template\WHP-Oly Styles.dwg