One aspect that is often overlooked or misunderstood when building label styles is the concept of dimension anchoring. This comes into play when composing label styles that show up in profile and section views. In many cases, you can take advantage of this capability to make your labels much more flexible. Read on to find out more…
When you create a label style component, one of the choices you must make is the Anchor Point: the point that the component “sticks to”. The choices vary based on the type of style, type of component, etc. but in the case of profile labels you almost always have at least one option that refers to a dimension. In the example below, there is an Anchor PVI and Anchor PVI Dimension option.
You can think of the Dimension Anchor as an invisible horizontal line that can move up and down in the profile view. The Anchor PVI Dimension would be the location where this Dimension Anchor line intersects with a vertical line passing through the PVI. As you change the location of the invisible dimension line, the “sticking point” for the PVI moves with it. You can see where this Dimension Anchor is by the appearance of a square grip that is rotated 45 degrees.
If you use the Dimension option as your anchor point, then your label components can move up and down with the Dimension Anchor without initiating dragged state.
Something else to know is that you have further control of the Dimension Anchor location in the label set and in the properties of each label. This is the Dimension Anchor Option property and as you can see in the image below, there are quite a few choices.
In the case of the label set, this is a great opportunity to set a default location for labels when they are initially created. Then, for individual labels you can use the Properties window to make adjustments for special cases. A lot of times when users find themselves unable to place a label where they want to, it’s because they’ve forgotten about the ability to change this property.
It’s impossible to show you everything that can be done with Dimension Anchoring in one blog post but hopefully this will give you a few areas to think about and explore when creating label styles or when troubleshooting their behavior.
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