What You See is NOT What You Get

You’re probably familiar with the acronym WYSIWYG. It’s one of the beauties of Revit, where what you see on screen is what you get in your prints. For the most part, that has been true prior to Revit 2013.

I’m surely late to the game in writing about this and it probably makes this post totally useless, but I suppose if I struggled so much to figure out how to fix the following problem in Revit 2013 and Autodesk Support themselves were unable to point me to the correct Hotfix (being told the usual canned response that the development team is aware of the problem but we cannot tell you when it’ll be fixed yada yada yada, even after pushing back to try get more detail), then I assume some soul out there might benefit from these ramblings too. This has been known for a while as you can see here.

Revit 2013 was no longer acting WYSIWYG when specific conditions were present. If certain elements were behind others that were set to 100% transparent and were totally “blocked” by said elements, then you see them on screen but you don’t get them in print. Bad, very bad, especially for Healthcare documentation and Interiors in general.

As you can see above, I said “on some machines”, but this problem actually affected all machines which were just updated to Update 2 but not with the hotfix.

It turns out in my random testing that my machine and another user’s worked fine and you guessed it…I had updated these manually a looong time ago in an effort to cure other problems with 2013, but forgot all about it (you know, the drawing area jumping into the ribbon? Yeah that one, but this hotfix isn’t so hot for that problem). I finally put 1 + 0.5 + 0.1 + 0.35 + 0.05 = 2 together and figured this hotfix actually worked to resolve the above symptom.

Anyway, I also checked that the recent Update 3 (for OneBox)incorporates this hotfix as well, so just skip it altogether and install Update 3 as fast as you can. There are separate downloads for the stand-alone packages.

I sincerely do appreciate the effort that most give at Autodesk Support when you file a Support Request, but sometimes I just cannot figure out how something like this wasn’t documented properly in their internal system and a conclusive resolution offered right away instead of having to deduce it myself. Oh well, that’s enough from grumpy Dave!

What You See is NOT What You Get