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One of our most tedious and common tasks is labeling swales. You draw a polyline, you add a few elevation markers based on the design surface, and that's about it. So it would be nice if we could write a program for that. Plus it would be nice if it's easy to maintain. According to my research, though, that's a tall order. The only languages that let you drill that deep into Civil 3D have to allow .NET or COM, and that means you have to install Visual Studio. I'd rather not do that just to create and maintain one app. Does anyone know of a way to access Civil 3D surfaces and create elevation labels using AutoLISP or some other interpreted language? Python, maybe? Not asking for code, just a more suitable way to write it.

Swales have always been finicky to draw with the proper annotation and it seems to be a common inquiry of forum users to find a code string that creates one automatically. I got sick of waiting and searching so I developed a code string that draws/repeats the squiggly line and triangle arrow annotation for me to make things faster and easier. It works (kind of) but it draws a continuous line over the swale symbols almost like a strike-through in MS Word (see attached image). I wouldn't mind it so much if it was a standard centreline symbol but my preference is for the "line" type to just be the repeating symbol and not have a line at all. Here is the code I've come up with (it is scaled to draw properly in inches--for metric scale the ltscale to 0.03937): *SWALE,Swale --> --> --> --> A,0,10,[sWALESYMBOL,swalesymbol.shx,x=1,s=1],65 I've saved it into my acad.lin file along with my swalesymbol.shx file which is just the squiggle and the arrowhead. When I draw a line or polyline using the linetype though I still get the solid line. Perhaps someone can post a reply that takes my code and tweaks it?