The Horizontal Axis Text (HAT) object can be used to place labels and vertical lines at the position of each Location on new Quick Section templates. The text labels can be placed outside or within the Strip Area.
(Note - the HAT object can't be used with legacy Quick Sections - only new Quick Section templates.)
Table of Contents
Object Placement
The HAT object works quite unlike other objects in OpenGround Template Studio.
You can place the object anywhere in the Quick Section grid.
The placement of the object determines the vertical position of the HAT on the generated Quick Section, but the HAT will print horizontally at the position of each Location within the Strip Area.
This is easiest to show with the example below.
In this example there are three HAT objects placed on the left side of the Quick Section template. Each HAT is set up to print the Location ID.
One object is in red and placed above the vertical extent of the Strip Area. The second is in yellow and placed within the vertical extent of the Strip Area. The third object is in green and placed below the Strip Area:
When the Quick Section is generated, you can see the text/line prints at the vertical position of each HAT object for each Location:
Object Properties
When a new HAT object is added to a Quick Section template, it will load with some default properties, including an example Expression that will print the Chainage (Station) of each Location. You can of course update the Properties for your purposes.
More information on each property is summarized below:
Group
This is the Group that is referenced when pulling in information from the OpenGround database. For HAT objects, only the LocationDetails Group can be referenced currently.
Header
It is possible to reference a Header from the LocationDetails Group to print that information within the HAT object.
Expression
It is also possible to write an expression for the HAT object.
The expression can reference Headers from the LocationDetails Group.
You can also use Section Functions to print information for each Location, such as the Chainage (Station) or the Offset from the Section Line. Please see this article for more information and examples of such expressions.
Colour / Thickness / Pattern / Pattern Offset
The colour, thickness, and pattern of the line.
If a Dashed or Dotted Pattern is used, the Pattern Offset can be used to control the spacing.
ShowSectionLineStartMarking / ShowSectionLineInterimMarking / ShowSectionLineEndMarking
These properties can be used to print a HAT object at the Section Line Start/End or interim points. These objects are hardcoded to always print the Station (Chainage) for that point to 2 decimal places. This can’t be edited currently. All 3 options are used in the example below:
Text Formatting and Styling
The text within the HAT object can be formatted using the Design ribbon.
Removing the Line or Text
Note that it is possible to have the HAT object show just the line, or just the text.
To show just a line with no accompanying text, you can set the Expression to be an empty string using 2 single quotes.
Alternatively, to show just the text. you can set the line Pattern to None.
Both techniques are used in the example below.
One HAT object uses an empty string as the Expression to show just the line:
A second HAT object has the line Pattern set to None to show just the text, in this case the Location ID and the offset from the Section Line:
This is the result. There’s a short line at the position of each Location with the text printed above: