Programming Challange!!!

[cadman6735]

Hello all

I have a challange for someone who knows how to VBA or what ever language Revit 2010 uses to create the macros or external tools... I have no clue how to program and I am too slambed to learn. (sorry excuse I know). You will be my hero if you deside to take on this challange.

What I need:

When printing to a file in Revit it appends the View/Sheet names to the file. We then have to rename every file to the sheet number only. (Short Name)

Printing to file does not give the option for short name as it does when exporting out to ACAD format.

If someone out there can write a "quick" macro that will only print the files to a short name so that I get:

A-101
A-102
M-101
etc... Short name

This would be my dream come true. Printing from Revit is a nightmare for us...

Please help

I am grasping for straws.

Thanks

[m20roxxers]

Depending on how you name the views you can get a find and replace windows file renaming tool. So therefore it removes the unwanted information for you.

Personally I don't have one as we don't hand out drawings but I am aware of a few firms using something like this.

[cadman6735]

Yes, we use a renaming tool... But it is not as pleasant as one would think. We have people that are in too much of a rush at crunch time and they don't pay attention to what they are doing and screw it all up. No matter how much you train there is all ways human error at crunch time. Then the higher ups are upset and the staff is stressed do to rework. It is a shame that such an awsome software is judged on it's "one flaw" at the last minute of the day by managment that don't even use the software but don't care when a deadline is involved.

Thanks for your suggestion

[cadman6735]

I don't see why Revit does not give you the option for Short name in printing to file as it does for exporting to CAD format.

Who saves there print files with such a long name assigned to it? I have only ever seen:

A-101
M-104
etc...

Short name should be an option for printing to file.

[twiceroadsfool]

We keep the entire sheet name, and prefix it with the job title...

08009 - Drawing Sheet - A-101 - Floor Plan- First.pdf
08009 - Drawing Sheet - A-102 - Floor Plan- Second.pdf
08009 - Drawing Sheet - A-103 - Floor Plan- Third.pdf

[STHRevit]

If you export your sheets to dwf you can select the short name option, just like cad files.
Then you can print your files from the dwf.
Is this an option?

[d.stairmand]

A great File Renaming Tool that i use for doing this Exact thing is Bulk Rename Utility
http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk

It allows for all sorts of stuff. Very useful for non Revit things too.

[arqt49]

I beleive it could be easyer using a batch file and the OS command line.
You can import the filenames into a text file using:
DIR /B > filename.txt.
Insert that file into excel, add a column with the clean filename you want - typical a concatenate function will do, and add a previous column with "rename" on it.
Extract those 3 columns into a file with BAT extension and run it.
For those ignorants of serious programming like me, these type of scripts work fine.

[patricks]

Shouldn't this be in the API forum?

Anyway, we typically print multiple sheets to a single file, so it's usually a non-issue for us. If we need separate sheets and they're aren't too many, then I'll just print as separate files and type in the name for each sheet PDF as it asks me.