Any thoughts on how to place text notes in Revit?

[hdjohnson]

I just started copying in our General Notes into Revit and found that their really isn't any easy way to format text in Revit. I have some paragraphs that need to be indented from the body of the text. The only way I can see to do this is to create another text box.

Anyone have any easy way to format text in Revit? Is there any way to create columns of text?

[beegee]

True text justification cannot be done at present.

However, you could set up a text annotation family to give you uniform width text objects if thats a help.
Go to File/New/Annotation Symbol and select the generic annotation template. Add your text, borders, etc., save it to a name you'll recognize, load it into your project, and place it on your views with the "Symbol" command under the drafting tab.

Alternatively, you can use Groups.
Create a group of text items. That allows you to move it to other
projects.
When you edit the group or copy it to another project, you will need to realign & retab. :roll:

Text improvements are on the wishlist.

[aggockel50321]

Another method.

What I've been doing lately, which I find works well, is to create the formatted text in MS Word, or whatever you use, convert the document to a jpg image file, import the image into your view.

The image can then be resized by dragging the corner grips, once the image is selected. Makes it easy to fit it on the sheet the way you want it.

As far as the conversion, I use pdf995 & pdfedit (www.pdf995.com), both freeware, first printing the word doc as a pdf file & then converting it to a jpg. Once you've tried it a couple of times, it's really fast.

Try it, you'll like it...

[Steve_Stafford]

I've been skirting around doing that too Andrew...have you been able to get the size to be consistent? Via the modify button and dialing in the size?

[aggockel50321]

Yes, you can.

The funny thing about Revit, is that when importing an image file, once you left click to place the file, it comes in at crazy sizes, but it will maintain the xy aspect ratio, you can then go into properties and resize it to it's original size.

[hdjohnson]

Andrew,

How's the image quality of the jpeg when you plot/print? Are the edges nice and sharp or does it look like an image?

[aggockel50321]

There is some degradation, but not enough to offset the ability to take advantage of the text formatting available, imho. I also use this method to import Excell spreadsheets.

Attached is a pdf showing the difference. The upper text was converted to jpg, then to pdf, & inserted in a Revit view. I used the default image quality (medium) settings in pdf995.

The lower text was placed on the same view using the text command.

It would be nice if Revit would include pdf as an image format that could be imported... I'm not sure if any quality loss is due to going from pdf to jpg...

[hdjohnson]

Andrew,

I think you're right. The image doesn't look that bad. I think the time that'll be saved doing it your way is worth it. Thanks for your help.

[Nickdp]

I actually go the other way - Create a blank sheet in Revit, call it "General Notes" or whatever with all the project information etc in your custom titleblock, then print it to PDF. Open Illustrator/Photoshop [or whatever PDf conversion utility is free] open the PDF file of the sheet, and convert to JPG, I use reasonably low compression to reduce the artifacts.

Next open MS Word, and Insert Picture from File, make sure you click on insert & link. This is to keep the .DOC file small and just in case the titleblock ever changes, just repeat the PDF export/Illustrator JPG conversion process and reopen Word, the changes will update.

Position the picture absolute to the page vertically and horizontally and make the wrapping style behind text. Anchor the pic also.

Set the margins so as to clear the title panel area and the sides of the sheet, and so the text fits neatly in the draiwng area. I then format for 4 or 5 columns, import the text from wherever, and let the text flow across columns left to right.

A few tips: if you need more than 1 notes sheet, create the next blank page in word, (insert page break) just cut'n'paste the picture from pg 1 into pg 2. It will line up exactly as pg 1. Repeat for more pages as required. Word simply flows the text onto however many pages you create. Also, in the titlepanel, keep the sheetno. label blank. In Word, create a small text box, manually position it where it should go (hold down Alt to turn off Word's annoying habit of snapping to grid) and type the new drawing sheet no eg GN01, or whatever, making sure you use the same font, then adjust the font size so it looks like it belongs.

The main benefit is that the general drawing notes are constantly changing as I'm working on the project, adding things, changing things, ie fine tuning the notes (which start off as a generic catch-all template). The titlepanel, however hardly changes at all once the project info etc has been defined.

When printing the full set of contract doc's, we print GN01, GN02, [GN03 etc] from Word, and A101, A102 etc from Revit. When collated and bound, nobody would ever tell the difference.

The multiple Word pages also is handy as we use A3 (11" x 17" for the septics) and the Notes tend to run over several sheets. See the example.

[aggockel50321]

Nice one Nick, I gotta give that a try.

[hdjohnson]

Nick,

That's a great idea for working with columns of text. I'll definitely give it a try.

[John K.]

Another method.

What I've been doing lately, which I find works well, is to create the formatted text in MS Word,
--snip--
As far as the conversion, I use pdf995 & pdfedit (www.pdf995.com), both freeware, first printing the word doc as a pdf file & then converting it to a jpg.

An alternate to this is to start weening off of M$ Word -- and Excel -- and use Openoffice [www.openoffice.org]. Will do *all of what M$ Office is capable of plus export directly as .pdf.

PS: Star Office is even better [supposedly] but not free.

PPS: These have both Windows AND Linux versions.

* "All" basically means I haven't found any critical missing features in these alternates. Excel, however, will do some very nice data string conversions that are still beyond OpenOffice.

[Steve_Stafford]

For another completely wacky approach to the text issue:

Copy/paste your text into an Mtext object in AutoCAD. Mtext will respect your formatting to some degree, bold, font size etc. No tabs however unless you are using 2004 (haven't installed 2004 here yet so...) You'll also get the spell checking features and case adjustment options inside AutoCAD.

Then you link the dwg to your Revit project. Edits are done in AutoCAD and reload the link to see the changes in Revit.

I also tried OLE into AutoCAD and then linking but the OLE object in AutoCAD isn't recognized by Revit and you get "zip".

Sad to report that AutoCAD 2004 does indeed respect tabbed text when copy/pasted into an Mtext object. The sad part is Revit importing the 2004 document does not respect the tabbed text, instead supplying code for the tab values. NOT pretty!! It would have been a great workaround!

[Nickdp]

Then you link the dwg to your Revit project. Edits are done in AutoCAD and reload the link to see the changes in Revit

Steve,

hadn't thought of that - good idea. In terms of reloading the acad linked file, I just close the Revit project then reopen, to see the changes in Revit, never really thought if there was a better/easier way to reload a linked Acad file. Is this how you do it or is there a better way?

LOL ... I tried [Reload Xref]^C^CXref;r;*;; but Revit doesn't have a screen menu.... ...and aren't we all happy about that !?!?! ...LOL

[beegee]

Hi Nick,

Yes there is a better way.

FILE>MANAGE LINKS>RELOAD.

[Nickdp]

Thanks Beeg. I really oughta poke around the pull-down menu's a bit - not limit my attention only to the Design Bar ...

[Norton_cad]

Use AutoCAD, (it has all the text tools you could want eg collumns, bullet points, spell check, fonts...)
then import the CAD into Revit, as a group. Job done....