Multilingual Projects

[RobG]

Has anyone had experience working in Revit on a project that is overseas (or local i suppose) that needs to be documented in 2 languages at once?

Reason I ask, our views, sheets and keynotes (to name 3 off hand real quick) need to be in 2 languages.

Views - we've found a workaround using the "Title on Sheet" in the properties where we do a CTRL+ENTER to give us a second line, allowing the foreign language to appear on the top, and the English title on the bottom as if it was 2 titles for one view on one view label

Sheets - we've used shared parameters to allow a second "sheet name" to be written in to the properties of the sheet, which is thankfully schedulable.

Keynotes - so far we're having issues that we haven't found an acceptable solution. The problem is the Keynote Legend, not the keynote tag themselves. The tag is typical with the number and the leader. The schedule allows two columns, one being the keynote tag number, the other being the Keynote Text (being read from the TXT file). The TXT file has all the info in english, but if we add it in the foreign language as well, not only does that line of info get LONG, but it makes for a legend that looks sloppy (with HUGE cells to contain all that info).

So, does anyone have any experience with keynotes in multilingual projects? And if so, are there any other aspects of the project that you've encountered issues with such a project?

Thx

[chris.macko]

We had a project in Romania with the same issues. I played around with note blocks and annotation objects, but in the end I just ended up using a / in the keynote file to seperate the languages.

[RobG]

yeah, we seem to have resorted to a "English - Foreign" setup. Using a slash wasn't clear enough. I wish there was a way to get multiline keynotes. Maybe they need to use the fact that it's a tab-deliniated file to allow a new tab to be a second language/line of information.

Wishlist request here i come!

[David Harrington]

I have not had this issue for quite some time but something I did years ago in AutoCAD *might* work in Revit?

Basically I had 3 fonts (SHX is/was the key).

One font I edited to have " " for every letter definition. No matter the wording, nothing was shown. This was "Blank.shx".

Then I had a font called English.shx and one called Spanish.shx.

When I went to do work in English, I would replace Spanish.shx with Blank.shx and put in English text.

When I wanted to work in Spanish, I would replace English.shx with Blank.shx and replace Spanish.shx with the *real* Spanish font file (that had letters).

So the key is being able to replace the used font with a TTF that has blank letters AND the same Windows name. A quick search found a blank font http://www.angelfire.com/pr/pgpf/if.html but I don't have the skills to edit the name (or that of Arial.TTF) so that I could mimic my AutoCAD technique.

I will add that it was pretty sweet. Exit AutoCAD, copy a SHX over another, go back in and see another language...

[RobG]

interesting approach for CAD, though I recall having French/English projects when I was living in Montreal 10+ years ago. We would just have the different languages on different layers, knowing we had to print both an English set of drawings and a French one for the same projects. I wish it was that easy in the current project. Problem is we need both on at the same time for most of our annotations, and it seems that Revit itself is the issue, not the fonts or language(s) in question.

[jcoe]

Aaron Maller posted an interesting solution on his blog about this. I do not encounter this in my work, but for some reason this blog post caught my attention. Its amazing the things you remember....

http://malleristicrevitation.blogspot.com/2010/05/revit-and-multi-language-documents.html

[RobG]

thanks for sharing that link, definitely interesting to see the approach that others are taking.

again, many thanks!