revit compatibility to previous versions

[gabcaf946720]

Well title says itself the topic!

Having a new version of revit should imply more advantages in building treatment and design, and of course it is! Revit is for me a very helpful tool, but! the problem comes out when I try to plott my prints from another version of revit! I've made this question to few fellows, teachers and professionals, have visited some forums on the web and the answer found is no compatibility. It'd be amazing to do it as we do in autocad, I mean work on a version 2012, save from here in a 2010 and then plott, that easy should be for Revit, sadly it seems it is not! So, what I must do, is to import to CAD and then plott and done! the problem is that once imported to CAD, making changes result a lil' tricky, a lil' like starting the project again... frustrating, ain't it? Well I thank your attention and hope to get some suggestions!

[DaveP]

The short answer is "No, you can't Save As to a previous version"
And you probably never will be able to. In almost every version, there is some feature that there is just no way to represent in previous versions. And then what do you do with it? Delete the element? Convert it to Lines? <shudder> Proxy graphics? Remember what a nightmare Proxy Graphics and Object Enablers were in AutoCAD? No thank you!

I'm curious, though, about your comments on plotting. Why would you need to convert to a different version just to plot?
What is there that you could plot 2010 that you can't in 2012?

[jsteinhauer]

When I first saw the title, i thought it was about bringing a project forward to a newer version. I'm with Dave, why do you need to convert a project backwards just to print? I could potentially see a benefit for someone who liked the older massing tool or material setups. The only other issue is, you might have a poor excuse for a software manager that didn't setup the roll-out correctly, so you don't have all the printers/paper sizes you need or had in a previous version.

I hope this helps,
Jeff S.

[vgonzales]

Create PDF or DWF files and send those files to the printer. Autodesk (even the RTC the original creator of Revit) has never allowed Revit to be backwards compatible.

[david_peterson]

The problem with going backward in Revit vs Cad is the function of the program. In Cad if you take a drawing that has all kinds of dynamic blocks or Annotative scaled text and bring it back to a version where it didn't exist, you now just have dumb text and or one block, if they come in at all. And at the end of the day it's all just dumb 2d line work. In Revit every object has some relationship to everything else. Pull out the one link that holds it together and it all falls apart. What good would a model be if you've removed everything from it? In essence that's what happens when you upgrade to a new version of revit. Everything gets converted to be able to work with the new code. Once converted, it can't be converted to a previous version because the code may not be the same. I'm still not sure why anyone would ever draw stuff in one version and save it back (dumb it down) to a previous version. Also in Cad, they only change the main source code about every 3 yrs and it's simple enough programming to go back a few version. I'm guessing if you tried to open your 2012 acad file in say R12, you're going to get very poor results.

[mburke.54112]

In a webinar I was in, an AutoDesk rep said flat out that Revit will never be able to save down/backwards like AutoCAD. It's the way they created / modifiy /updated the 3-D entities.

[MikeJarosz]

Another case of Acad users wanting Revit to be more like the CAD program they already know!

[david_peterson]

Another case of Acad users wanting Revit to be more like the CAD program they already know!
So when I say that revit needs a text editor sim to acad is that still me wanting the program to be more like cad or just that I simply want the program to have the function?
There's plenty of things that can be done faster and better in Cad than in Revit. That doesn't mean I want the program to work exactly like one I already know, it's because I want it to work.

[MikeJarosz]

Sorry, I was referring to the plotting post, not your desire for a better text editor in Revit. I should have been more specific. I agree that Revit needs a better text editor.