Topic Title

The hardest part of site work is remembering how the "compass" works when in "bearings". I usually do all the layout and bearings-work with 'straight-up' being NORTH regardless of how the final drawing will orient. If not a total-pain, I'll even put the title-block and border in at an angle. You can always "rotate" the entire finished drawing to a normal orientation later-on during the drawings process.

One thing to keep in mind is you can change both the "units" and "compass-type" back and forth while your working on the drawing. This is useful when you have engineers' decimal feet on the drawing, yet need to imput foot-inchs from your architectural drawings. I just wish that when the grid-angle was not "zero", there was a graphic in the lower corner to remind you of the offset compass-directions like Autocad has.

It woud be handy to have a little icon in the drawing-field indicating North and East", or "0 and 90-degrees" so you knew the direction and clock-wise or counterclock-wise rotation.

I know that this isn't necessarily what you're hoping for, but here's a cheap trick that I've been using since 1988:

I'll draw the site with north up and let the property lines go where the metes/bounds directs them to. I'll then put a target at each property corner with the crosshairs in the vertical/horizontal position. This way I can rotate the site to my heart's content and always have a reference of the true compass direction!