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

Phase Filter Overrides

I’m working on an Addition & Renovation job (yet again) and have been using phase filters extensively. Here are some of the things I would like to have when working on these types of projects:

• Sometimes I need to change the representation of a phase filter override by view and not project-wide. For example in a presentation sheet, I might want to “color code” differently than for Construction Documents. Currently I have to change my phase filters, print to PDF and then change them back so my Construction Document views are the way I want them.
• I use a colored solid fill to easily distinguish new from existing work. However when printing, I run into a problem as those solid colors don’t result in a nice, solid black on paper. Also when printing PDFs, you get colored fills instead and there are cases I don’t want that. So I have to change my phase filter overrides before printing. This shouldn’t be required. I would like to be able to not only print colored lines in black, but also colored fills in black.

Here’s what the view looks like on screen (this is only a small part of the job, so don’t think I’m doing restroom renovations for a living!). When printed to PDF with the Colors option set to Black Lines, purple cut & projected lines turn to black like I want, but the solid fill is still purple. This is the reason I think the above would be useful, especially because on certain printers, color fills turn into a nasty & inconsistent gray.

I have might have more issues with Phase Filters, but that’s it for now. Comments and opinions welcome!

Phase Filter Overrides

A tale of a ghost

So I'm sitting here kicking myself for not thinking of this earlier, but now I'm a better man for it!

Bill comes to me in desperation..."I have an image that is printing in every single section and elevation view, but it doesn't show up in the actual view!". I looked at him in awe....I thought he had a sip too many. "Bill, that can't possibly be true! Don't you know that what's not in your view, cannot print?! That's a Revit basic behavior!". So I reluctantly stroll to his desk and we open up the project file. Sure enough, the darn raster image shows up in the Print Preview. So I start troubleshooting....turning visibility of links, raster images with absolutely no positive results. Then Bill pointed out that if the crop region doesn't include the first level, the image goes away. I immediately start blaming some project corruption on the level and thought that we're going to have to send it to Autodesk Support.

And then it hit me.....I turned off all Imported Catergories (those awful DWG files) and the raster images vanished from the print preview! Hurray! Problem solved. Don't ask me how that raster image got there in elevation in all section/elevation view of all orientations, as the dwg files were used as backgrounds for casework and other things that we didn't do in Revit in plan, but that's what was wreaking havoc. Pretty simple issue to resolve....DON'T USE DWGS!!

Well, use with caution :)

A tale of a ghost