Overview

The world is 3D, but almost every design starts as a concept: a flat line on a flat piece of paper. Cutting a way through the trees, the hills, and the forests, we design around a basic layout to get some idea of horizontal placement. This horizontal placement is the alignment and drives much of our design. In this chapter, we'll look at how alignments can be created, how they interact with the rest of the design, how to edit and analyze them, how styles are involved with display and labeling, and finally, how they work with the overall project.

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

• Create an alignment from a polyline

• Create a reverse curve that never loses tangency

• Replace a component of an alignment with another component type

• Create a new label set

• Override individual labels with other styles

Alignments, Pickles, and Freedom

There are two major concepts that you have to understand before you can efficiently work with alignments: the interaction of alignments and sites, and the idea of geometry that is fixed, floating, or free.