So, Almas over at Being Civil wrote about how to get a property line label to look correctly. You can read it HERE. He had two solutions, the first was to use a code that would combine the P and the L together to form the property line symbol, the second is to simply toggle on the Flip Anchors with Text option in the style.

In the situation he had, either of those solutions would work just fine but, what about this situation? 1) I don’t want to use letters that have a predefined code for them and 2) I want to adjust the label so that the entire thing is centered on the line, not just one of the letters. In this example, I have a Water Line and a Sewer Line label and I want them to look something like:

In this case I created a label with two text components, a “W” and an “L” (for Water Line). I attach the bottom center of the “W” to the label location and then add a negative Y adjustment so the line is passing through the bottom of the “W”. I then attach the top left of the “L” to the middle center of the “W” and everything looks good, that is until the label flips to be plan readable, hence the point of Almas’ post.

Again, if you haven’t done so, go to Being Civil and read it. This post will make much more sense if you do!

Now if I follow along and do as Almas recommends and toggle on the Flip Anchors option in the style, this is what happens:

It’s close, REALLY close but just not quite right. The problem is, even though the anchors flipped when the text did, the adjustment I made to the “W” component was relative to the line! In the left label, it adjusts above the line and in the right label, it adjusts below the line. So, what to do? (To learn more about what Flipping Anchors does, read one of my previous posts HERE.)

Well, it really isn’t all that hard, you just have to think outside the box a bit. Have you ever noticed when creating label styles that you can toggle on and off the visiblility of different components? Well, we are going to use that to our advantage. Add a new text component, a placement component, to the label and attach it middle center to the label point (I didn’t even bother changing the “Label Text” default) and change the visibility option to False. Now, attach the first component (the “W” in this case) to that placement component. Now, when the label flips to be plan readable, the placement text flips and the “W” adjusts relative to this instead of the line!

In the top portion of the following image, you can see the results of this label style. In the bottom portion, I’ve turned the visibility of the placement text on (and made it green) as well as adding in a pink direction arrow so you can see the lines are running in opposite directions.

Hopefully this makes sense to everyone. If you have questions, leave comments on this post and I’ll answer them as I can.