Revit as InDesign replacement

[ron.sanpedro]

We have a need to put on the order of a few hundred 8.5X11 & 11X17 scanned images, sketches, cut sheets and whatnot on title blocks and make PDFs. Basically a supplemental information package to follow a more traditional DD set. Of course we started down the InDesign path, but we have only a few InDesign seats and a few more InDesign users. So my thought was, why not do this in Revit?

Pro: Lots of Revit Users, lots of Revit machines, Management hears "Revit" rather than "Adobe". A single file that multiple people can work in, rather than having to choose between one file, or multiple people.

Cons: Images have to be tweaked to be reasonably to scale; scan to PDf and drop in InDesign and scale is not an issue. Also, InDesign will I think compress images, so someone dropping a 1200 dpi scan by mistake won't be catastrophic. I suspect in Revit it would be. ;)

That said, has anyone tried this? I am thinking a single dedicated project, with nothing but images and title blocks and maybe some notes. But I am a little worried about what 200 8.5 x 11 x 200 dpi images could do to Revit. Comments welcome.

Thanks,
Gordon

[Dimitri Harvalias]

Have you considered using Design Review?
You can combine all manner of files into a mult-page DWF using the dwf print driver. Hand sketches scanned to JPG, Revit drawings, ACAD drawings, Word, Excel... you name it.
The reader is free (and so is design Review) and you get the bonus of having mark up tools.

I think your concerns about that number of images in a Revit file are warranted. On occassion I've used Revit as a 'Desktop Publishing' package (keep it all in one place and one file) and it can get bogged down with the image files.

[mruehr]

Hi Gordon
We use lots of big images in DA's and Presentation Sets.
With the last project when going over 400Megs i had to take all the Image and Graphic sheets out in to a separate Project file and set up views there.
it worked out fine as it let the Photoshop people do their thing and sheet coordination was still Revit.
The only hiccup we had was, if to many views where open at the same time sometimes they went all Black and the only way to get out of it was to restart the computer.I never worked out why
Maybe not enough video ram?

[atbergma]

We're looking at MS OneNote for this sort of thing. It's part of Office 2007 or can be had alone for $99. Virtually 0 learning curve. Document can be shared (simultaneous multiple users, I think) Has its own printer driver so output from other software can be captured. Strikes me as sort of a poor man's InDesign. Seems pretty light and the interface is quite quick and intuitive. Also, comes with 60-day trial.

[ron.sanpedro]

We're looking at MS OneNote for this sort of thing. It's part of Office 2007 or can be had alone for $99. Virtually 0 learning curve. Document can be shared (simultaneous multiple users, I think) Has its own printer driver so output from other software can be captured. Strikes me as sort of a poor man's InDesign. Seems pretty light and the interface is quite quick and intuitive. Also, comes with 60-day trial.

That is an interesting thought. Certainly better than DesignReview, which is single user, doesn't allow for title block input, doesn't scale images automatically, etc. OneNote might not allow those things either, but we are currently using it extensively to coordinate a project that is 5 models, 9 buildings and 20 users, it is multi-user enabled, we all have it and are all familiar with it. Do you know off hand if it is easy to create a title block type of thing, with individual data per sheet? That can be placed on top of a page so to speak. I am pretty sure I can print from Acrobat Reader direct to OneNote, so the scanned full scale PDF into one note might be easy. My thought with Revit was to put a 1" line off to the side of every image before scanning, then size the image to that, but Print to OneNote would be much slicker. The nice thing about PDF is the scanned PDF is "to scale" and Acrobat, InDesign & Illustrator understands that, so you drop a scanned image in and it is to scale with no extra work. If there was a way to convert images to DWF with scale intact, and DWF allowed for parameter/attribute functionality, then DR would be useful for this, and Addenda/Revision sketches as well. But hey, maybe OneNote is our Addenda/Sketch answer as well. Dependent view for each "sketch", cropped down tight, and Printed to OneNote. Shwiiiiing! Crossed fingers for something like a title block in OneNote.

Best,
Gordon

[aaronrumple]

I think there are lots of options for this task. Revit would be one of my last choices. Large numbers of raster files inside Revit make for super huge file sizes and slow performance, so it wouldn't be my choice.

CorelDraw is perfect for this task. It is easy to set up multipage documents. Makes PDF on it's own. Supports almost any file type. Import PSD, PDF, TIF, JPEG, AI, DWG, etc.... Plus it has low cost and is pretty simple to use. Corel also supports file linking so your master document can remain small. (Like InDesign).

You might even want to conside something as low tech as PowerPoint. I know tha HOK here in town was using several years back for exactly this task. And of course it hase a very low learning curve. So it may lack in features, but everyone should be able to figure it out.

We use InDesign here. It isn't the best tool and there are only two of us that can use it.

[mtchuff]

For free, to use it as powerpoint but without all the animations stuff you don't need for your purpose and above all absolutely FREE, there is OpenOffice.org that points out with the Draw application.
You should give a try !

[hand471037]

We used to use OpenOffice, but it never seems to be that great on OS X.

We have InDesign CS3, but it's always more than we need for this sort of thing unless there is a ton of text involved.

So we use Revit for small stuff, and actually Keynote (part of the iWork package, it's pretty much a nicer looking version of Powerpoint) for anything that has lots of pages and pictures. We also make heavy use of Pages, the Word replacement, that's part of the iWork package.

Much of the time we're showing presentations to folks off our laptops, that using a package like Keynote that can produce nice layouts for both web, screen, PDF, and print, at pretty much the same time with hardly any work to go from one format to another. The iWork package is really good at this, and it's an order of magnitude cheaper than the Microsoft stuff.

If you don't have the need to show the documents online or on screen than a simple publishing tool like the OpenOffice one or the basic Microsoft one can work just fine. I did several layouts using the old Microsoft Publisher tool and unless you need to deal with a ton of text it worked just fine.