Stock Revit Line Styles

[dbaldacchino]

Hi all,

For the life of me, I can't find any info on this, although I thought that there are differences between some of the stock line styles....

Some styles are just named "Thin", "Wide", etc., while others start and end in a bracket; ex: <Overhead>. What is the reason for the "< >", if there is any?

[Dimitri Harvalias]

I asked this question some time ago David (can't seem to locate the post) and the explanation I got was that the <> styles are default ones used by system families and therefore they can't be deleted or renamed without fouling things up.

[dbaldacchino]

Thanks Dimitri.

That's weird as families don't use line styles in the Object Styles dialog. They're assigned a line weight and a color. I know they cannot be renamed or deleted (that applies to the stock "Thin", etc. too) but the color and line weights can be changed in both cases. So on the surface they look the same, just with a different naming convention. I'm surprised it's not documented anywhere (ahhhh, the questions we ask ourselves sometimes!).

[dbaldacchino]

Ok I traced one of them. "Thin Lines" is used whenever you draw an object and you get those lines on your screen, against which temporary dimensions/angles are placed.

I made a suggestion to our group to not use the stock linestyles since we cannot rename them. We created our own that reside at the top of the list and are "indented" by adding spaces to the style name, which makes them easy to spot from the stock styles. To find out where the stock styles are used, I changed the color to yellow, dash dot and selected a very thick line weight. This way you can recognize immediately where Revit uses them. Of course I changed "Thin Lines" back to something more visually pleasing :) (I used a color to discern between "drafting" line styles, which are all black, and others that either shouldn't be used or styles that are meant to convey information, such as Expansion Joints, Sight Lines etc.).

[Steve_Stafford]

If you look at the default templates all the linestyles defined there are not removable nor can you rename them. Therefore I believe they should all be bracketed to indicate that they are System required elements or as some would have, provide the ability to remove or rename them. I'm not sure what Revit would do if we removed one it needed though and that's probably why it isn't possible so far.

[dbaldacchino]

Yep, I fully agree. I still can't find where the other unbracketed ones are used.

[Steve_Stafford]

Yep, I fully agree. I still can't find where the other unbracketed ones are used.In families mostly.

[phyllisr]

For bumps and giggles (and because I was curious), I wanted to uncover the absolute rock bottom minimum amount of "stuff" that Revit requires in an .rvt file including line styles, line patterns and more. So I started a new project from the OOTB default template. I created a drafting view in this project that was totally empty with no content. Then, I saved the empty drafting view to a new project. The result was a small file with minimal stuff. After I purged anything and everything I could find, I ended up with a 144 KB file. Not very useful but interesting.

Once I did this, I started a new family. As an experiment, I transferred project standards from my stripped .rvt file into a new generic model family. Now I want to understand the resulting content that had to be in the stripped file (attached clip) that I cannot find. Like Regeneration Failure. And <Defined by Instance>. And I want to know why a generic model template has Stairs Beyond Cut Plane.

All my wasted energy on something that is ultimately not very important...