Adding or Editing Lighting Symbols
If you want to customize the symbols for fixtures and other equipment used in your lighting plans, you're free to edit our default symbols or add your own.
Accessing & Editing Our Lighting Symbols
Our lighting symbols download on demand. If you place a piece of equipment, its symbol should download as necessary. Each of our symbols is simply a block that originates from the linework in a separate DWG file, known as a source file, within our lighting symbol library. The lighting symbols are located in the LandFX\Blocks\discipline_graphics\30-electrical\lighting folder.
As with our other cloud-based blocks, you won't see these source files in this location until you've placed a certain lighting symbol in a drawing for the first time. To preview the lighting symbol library, or to edit the source file, open our Discipline Graphics tool:
F/X Site ribbon, Discipline Graphics flyout
F/X Details ribbon, Discipline Graphics button
F/X Site menu, Discipline Graphics option
or type DisciplineGraphics in the Command line
In the Discipline Graphics dialog box, expand the Electrical category, then select the Lighting subcategory.
To edit a lighting symbol, select its thumbnail preview and click Edit.
The dialog box that opens will allow you to make edits to the selected symbol.
1. Larger preview image of the selected symbol
2. If you want, add a Description of the symbol.
3. Scale setting for the selected symbol. We recommend selecting the Dimscale option.
4. Rotation setting for the selected symbol. We recommend selecting the Manual option.
5. Units setting for the selected symbol. Select the option that matches the units you normally use in your designs.
6. Click Open File to open the source file for the selected symbol and make your desired changes to it.
Adding Your Custom Lighting Symbols
Whether you already have lighting symbols created, you're drawing them from scratch, or you're editing our symbols, it's easiest to start by editing one of our symbols as described above. We recommend browsing our Lighting symbols in the Discipline Graphics dialog box (pictured above)for the symbol with the closest appearance to what you have or want to create.
You can then edit that symbol's source file by clicking Open File.
The source file for the selected symbol will open, allowing you to make your edits. Take care to maintain the following standards, which we apply to our default symbols:
- The point of rotation, or the center, of the symbol block should be placed at 0,0, and
- The block should be facing due east.
Keeping these standards in place will ensure that your custom symbol places properly in your drawings.
Confirming the Scale of your Symbols
Our lighting symbols are created at a size that will work appropriately across all scales, with their appearance on a plotted sheet at 1" = 20' (1:250) being the basis of their size. The easiest method to confirm that your lighting symbols are an appropriate size is to copy our lighting symbol linework into your lighting symbol drawing.
The example image to the right shows a custom lighting symbol with one of our Land F/X symbols next to it.
We can see that the custom symbol needs to be scaled and rotated, and its center-point placed at 0,0.
One option is to move the custom lighting symbol linework to our layers.
The example custom lighting symbol is now ready to be saved into our lighting library.
When your lighting symbols are ready to be added to our library, follow our Save Block documentation to bring them in.
Naming Your Lighting Symbols
Our symbol library currently has no way to create user categories like our hatch library does. The symbols are sorted alphabetically, so if you want your symbols to be available first, we recommend a naming convention where your custom symbols are named starting with something like A-, as shown below.
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