Drafting tricks

[clog boy]

Drafting? In Revit? Yes. Annotations are still the last (unfortunate) step in the BIM process, when it comes to human readable floorplans. That goes even more so for construction drawings.
I need to speed up the annotation process for my next promotion, got tips anyone? The model itself is almost in mint condition for each drawing, thanks to our templates. It's the dimensioning and tagging that needs an adrenaline boost.

[Mike Sealander]

Take a page from the hand-drafting era: Use shorthand instead of lengthy text descriptions. Keyed tags are one approach, but we also use Mark and Type Mark tags to quickly (and automatically) tag a whole bunch of model components.

[pfaudler]

I agree with Mike.
to add further to that, Use tags as much as possible. We recently started using Tags for mostly every elements in Sections and elevations. It saves lot of time.
We have two sets of tags, one for plans and one for elevations and sections.

[nsinha73]

Tags?....Keynote Tags w/ Text?....Does that work good?.....I never thought about that....We do our Entire CDs in Revit. No Acad here. From model to detailing....But thanks for the tip though. I never thought of it but wondering if it is worth
What we did was Annotate it manually. But if You guys say Tags work good. I'd then like to know more. And pretty sure make my work easy.
However, our details have much Detail Lines and Detail Components, how do I tag them?
Thanks

[greg.mcdowell]

Tagging is great but yeah, you can't tag a drafting line. Thing is, it's no more work to create the same thing as a detail family. In fact it more than makes up for any additional time when you start to reuse the component.

Not sure where you got the suggestion of moving out to AutoCAD. Everything that came before is very doable in Revit.

I use Keynote tags tied to our specs. For any additional textual information about an item I've started using a Multi-Category tag to pull information from the Instance Comment field of the object. Not as much help with detail components but great for model elements.

[kathy71046]

Use a set of Tags that suits your application.

I use Multi-Category Tags with Description, size and finish fields (plus comments) typically for most objects, and a Tag with Description and Type Comments for Structural Members on Architectural Drawings

In my Structural Drawings I will use wall, column and framing tags, which have engineering (type mark) and another type of the same family for Detail Mark numbers (Mark) so that my layout drawings for detailing simply need to duplicate, switch tags, and tweak.

Some objects like balustrades can't be tagged, but you can create a family with a small object, an invisible line, and parameters, and then tag that for untaggables, and override the solid geometry to not display.

For details that will be reused, I would suggest either making families and inserting them into your detail callouts, or you could possibly create groups that you then save separately and load as needed.

Once you have your objects set up with their custom parameters, make sure you save a template from your project, and then you will have all your standard descriptions set up within the objects, and save all that typing time from every project in the future.

[clog boy]

Oh our Architecture families show in all relevant views and are tagable. We use shared parameters. We do it like Revit was designed.
We also tried using nested tags, but it had it's downsides. (cant be done for all family types)

Just checking whether I'm missing a shortcut. ;) Never experimented that much with keynotes though.

[Elmo]

Keynoting is definately a route worth looking at. It will definatly improve your time.