More on the UI – Text Leaders

EDIT: As of Revit 2011, the following has been solved. Thanks for listening!

Minor thing perhaps, but they all add up, don’t they?

The text leader option buttons in 2010 can be a lot better. First off, it’s hard to visually tell the difference between them and you have to read the label. The old ones were better at communicating their function.

Location is also an issue. Why stack them? It’s not intuitive at all. If you have left and right options, place them in left & right positions and not top and bottom!

Finally, if you’re reading this post, make sure to visit this other post and submit your feedback immediately. You’ll be helping yourself and others as well.

PS: Oh look! Seems like better leader icon placement is in the works. However, that ‘A’ is obnoxiously big and distracting. Make it smaller please!

More on the UI – Text Leaders

Illegal Immigrants

EDIT: As of Revit 2010 SP3 (could have been earlier), the following is no longer a problem. Thanks for listening!

No, this post won’t discuss such political issues. We’ll leave that to Lou Dobbs on CNN.

A lot of users enter symbols in Revit or any other application, by typing Alt + a series of digits. For example Alt+0178 results in ². In Revit 2010, this will work for the first character you type after using this technique for the first time since installing the application. After that, your screen will be taken over by foreign characters with each subsequent try.

It seems to keep changing with each try, even though you use the same digit combinations. I hope this gets fixed soon! In the meantime the workaround is to go to the Character map and copy & paste the symbol from there.

Illegal Immigrants

Text Notes

So in Jumpy Text, we looked at a technique that we can employ to alleviate the well known deficiencies of text in Revit. Now you know how to use Key Schedules for this purpose, but I wanted to take this a little step further after a great tip I learned from a discussion with my good friend Daniel Hurtubise of RevitIt.

I mentioned the problem of the schedule title being the same as the name of the key schedule in the Project Browser (PB). So if you prefix the names to group them nicely in the PB, you’ll have a problem with your title. To get around this, we can disable the title and group the headings. Then we can type in our new “title” in this new space, independently of the name!

The problem though is that for notes on documents, we don’t need the headings, so this solution wouldn’t be very clean as we don’t want to see the parameter names and if we turn them off, so does the new group “title”. However Revit lets us edit these names and to my surprise (and here comes my little contribution), it lets us make them blank! So by unchecking the option Blank row before data, we can still end up with a separate title, a blank row and our text notes indented with a number for each paragraph, as you can see below (click to see larger animation). This is without a doubt a better solution than typing text for the title. Enjoy!

Text Notes

Jumpy Text

This is one of the most annoying behaviors in Revit. I can’t believe that we’ll have to deal with it for at least another year. Pretty sad.

We need text, don’t we? Unfortunately creating project notes in Revit is a frustrating endeavor. Text re-formats itself depending on the zoom factor, which is totally insane if you ask me. Take a look at this animated gif.

So how do we deal with this issue? You could link in a dwg that contains your text, but this can potentially result in more headaches as mtext boxes are sometimes ignored by Revit. And honestly, I want to stop using DWG files altogether. Another huge limitation is the inability to indent text so you can number each paragraph and be able to adjust the column width of your text without resulting in a formatting do-over.

Back at AU2007, I learned a tip which I’ll be employing from now on. I feel really dirty using it, but there’s no other solution I can think of. I’m not sure where it originated but I learned about it through a hallway chat with the “Rock-n-Roll Architect”, aka Steven Shell. If you know who contributed it, please post a comment. Here it goes…

Create a Key Schedule for a category that you never use. No, the Roads category is not available ;) In this example I chose the Sprinklers category but you’re free to pick anything you want.

Notice the Name field. That’s the name of your key schedule in the project browser, and will also be your Title when you drag this onto a sheet. It’s not necessary to change it in this dialog since you can rename it later in the Project Browser. I named my example “GENERAL NOTES”. Next, type in a Key name and click OK, which leads us to the Fields tab.

Add a new parameter to house your text notes; I used “MyText”. In the Sorting/Grouping tab, sorting will be set by default to the Key Name, which is exactly what we want. This will contain the numbering of each paragraph. To finish up, set your appearance preferences. In my case, I wanted a wide outline and turned off the option to Show Headers as we don’t really need them. Once you click OK, you’ll be in schedule editing mode which will just show the title (If you choose to not have a title, you’ll get a blank page). The next step is to add rows to your key schedule. Let’s use Revit’s new interface to illustrate (click animated gif for larger view).

Now you just drag this onto a sheet and make final adjustments there. This should eliminate the problem of Jumpy Text. A couple of issues that you’ll face are the fact that you don’t have Project Browser sorting/grouping capabilities and that you cannot use the same schedule name twice, so you’ll have to get creative. One option is to have these key schedules named with a prefix so they’ll be grouped together in the Project Browser and separate from “real” key schedules (ex: txt_Roof General Notes). Then you would turn off the Title and just type in text directly on your sheet as seen below.

PS: Autodesk, PLEASE, this needs fixed. Seriously.

Jumpy Text