Trimble Business Center

When using a linestring as a reference line, it would be useful if there was some delineation of the line direction. This would save incorrect guessing for offsets (-/+).

Cases where this would apply:

• Offset line
• Snap - Offset Line
• Side slope command
• On the vertical component of editing a linestring

As I think of other scenarios I will add them in a reply.

Don't disagree with the request at all Pat - I have made similar requests in the past. There are a couple of things that you can do however today that may assist you

1) Line Markings - the Start of Line Line marking is always a solid circle, the end of the line an open circle - so if you can see one end of the line and you have line markings turned on - you can see the direction of the line from that

2) I would create a Linestyle called Direction Line and have that as a solid line with an arrow in the middle, then while working, rather than showing all lines as solid, you can show lines as they are defined, and I would change all linestyles to Solid except those where the direction was important and have those drawn as a Direction Line - that way you can always see the direction of the lines while working. When done, just change the Linestyles by layer back to Solid and you would be good to go.

While not specifically what you are asking for - this is a way to get what you want today.

Video shows you how

I will log it in as a request again and I would suggest we make it a part of Line Markings / Filter Line Markings, because you will not want Arrows on all lines all the time, you would want to select the lines you are working with and then Filter Line Markings (CTRL F or similar hot key) because if you are eg drawing a point and you select Offset and then select a Line Segment - the line is the reference not the object being created or edited and it may be a trick to always know that when you are doing certian functions you want the Line Markings to show up or not - clearly when editing an object it would be good to know which way it goes, but when using the lines as a reference I am not sure that the way the software is designed lends itself to switching on a direction arrow as soon as an object is selected but only in certain scenarios - ie if you selected 1000 lines to delete them, you would not want the Line Markings to show direction, however when editing a line or using it as a reference you would etc. SO it is not a 100% simple thing to solve here I dont think.

Filter Line Markings may be easy though

Alan

Good trick!

In your example using the Offset snap, if you leave the Station field blank and put your cursor in the Offset field, you can then click on the side of the line you want to go at an arbitrary offset distance and it will place the offset as either positive or negative in the field.  Thus it reveals the direction; then I just change the offset distance to the distance I want and go back to the station field.

It's easier in the Offset Line command; all you do is click in the "Side to offset" box and then just click on either side of the line the direction you want to offset.  Or you can do the same trick as above too, just put your cursor in the "Offset distance" field and click on the side of the line you want to offset and it will change the offset distance and side to match your click, then just change the distance to the correct value.  

But I still agree that it would be nice to visually see what direction the line was running.  I do like in the geometry editor you can see little arrows on the PIs but if you're zoomed in to a point where no PIs are visible you're out of luck.  

I'm not on my work laptop to provide a screen clip, but in some cases I've found that the coordinate scroll with the Alignment  / Offset (i think) turned on will provide a + or - offset for the cursor position once the reference line is selected. Hope that helps.

I also agree that directional glyphs, similar to the display is SCS900, when a line is selected would be very helpful. Currently, I use the edit command to determine the direction if needed.