For years, cross-section annotation in OpenRoads Designer has come with a big condition: “ORD needs to know the features first.”
That’s been a major roadblock for teams working with partners who live outside the Bentley world — GIS departments, surveyors delivering DWGs, asset owners using ESRI services, or planners managing cadastral data in their own systems.
The new EPP Cross-Section Annotation Tool removes that restriction entirely.
You can now annotate any information that Bentley DGN can display in your cross-sections — even if ORD has never heard of it before.
That includes:
- GIS cadastral boundaries and property data
- AutoCAD (DWG) 2D and 3D strings
- ESRI REST services
- External 3D models and linework
- Any element with accessible properties (levels, line styles, PFI values, custom attributes, item types, etc.)
And it’s not just visual. You can automatically add:
- Dimensions and slope labels
- Offset and elevation call-outs
- Cells placed at meaningful positions
- Property labels (e.g. lot numbers, boundary IDs, asset attributes)
All directly onto your cross-sections.
The real change isn’t just in presentation — it’s in workflow freedom.
You’re no longer forced to import, reclassify, or “teach” ORD about external features just to see them in cross-section. If it can be displayed in MicroStation, it can now be annotated in your sections.
That’s a big deal for collaborative projects where design, cadastral, utility and GIS data live in different ecosystems.
Less time converting data.
Less time reworking cross-sections.
Better information for better engineering decisions.
And ultimately — safer, clearer documentation for the people building it on site.
If you’ve ever had to explain why something didn’t show up in section just because ORD “didn’t know it”… you’ll understand why this one matters.
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