? Question Marks in Tags

[brenehan]

I like any other user use automatic tagging a lot. It's great.
However sometimes they do some funny display things. If you go to wire frame, or use temporary hide / isolate or go to sketch mode, often tags that did have data in them, start displaying a Question Mark (this I understand because of the mode you are in). It generally applies to material or keynote tags, but can happen to some other tags.
When you go back to the standard view they fix themselves most of the time, but sometimes they don't.
My first fix solution is to refresh the view. If this doesn't work I select the tags and nudge them. This always seems to fix them and the data code re-appears.

Does anyone really understand this behaviour? I don't understand why they don't always restore them selves. I'm really not a fan of the nudge method.
Can anyone shed any light on this?

Thanks
Brian

[d.stairmand]

Brian
Its all in the way you hold your Tongue! or which side of the Clock the Second's Hand is on!

There are a few things that go wrong one day - then the next there all fixed up.
Just make sure the day they get fixed up is Issue Day!

[clog boy]

...and the skies cleared, and a deep reverbing voice said 'start a Revit voodoo tribe!' And there was much rejoicing. ;)

[brenehan]

So I gather the big bad "Bug" word needs to come into this thread then!
Has anyone found any improvement in 2009 with the issue?
I suppose we could name the Voodoo Tribe; "Nudge"

[tomnewsom]

The ?s only appear if the tag family has no non-label objects visible. So when you turn the 'box' visibility off, you see the ?s. To fix this, include a tiny bit of linework in your tag family that is always visible.

[brenehan]

Hi tomnewsom
I know what you mean, but that wasn't the big issue there. I had an example of it today. I need to change the material tagging code of the floor slab. I selected the slab, went to its properties, change the relative parameter, clicked OK. All the Floor material tags now had a question mark on them. To fix it, I need to nudge all the tags one nudge and they worked perfectly. Sometimes you just have to select the tag and it works.
I've come across this a lot on larger jobs along with another clutter of misbehaviour.

Brian

[angus.110169]

It is a bug as far as I can tell, and it is VERY irritating.
We have a project which is in construction, I haven't touched the drawings for about a month - and I know they were perfect as that day WAS issue day.

However today I opened the project to export autocad drawings for consultants and in one of my elevations all of the material tags had become "?"

I had to through manually and fix them by "nudging"

I hate these problems in Revit where you have to be lucky to "notice" that they are occurring, I can't spend 20 minutes reviewing my drawings every time I just want to open them and print.

I just came on the forum to post this exact rant and found this post already up!

[cliff collins]

Suggestions:

1. Make PDFs of all critical issue sets--print from PDFs, not from Revit.

2. You can "select all" and "pin" all keynote tags--so they do not mysteriously "move"
and become "unconnected" with the object they are tagging.

cheers......

[brenehan]

Hi Cliff

You are spot on about printing from PDF. Even better is DWF. You can even use the compare tool to previous drawing releases to ensure only what you want to have been changed, has been changed.

Unfortunately, with many of the tags the pin solution won't help every situation. It's not that the tag is moving, it's that through some other problem it is becoming dissociated. It tends to happen on large project. The switching to wire frame and then back to hidden lines is a good example. Some of the tags can come back with the “?” displayed.

B

[sbrown]

We just had this happen with material tags. Any tag near a Matchline would change to ? its really a problem. Has anyone filed a support request?

[twiceroadsfool]

We had it occur in an interesting fashion with linked files:

We have Material tags on the exterior of our Architectural Walls. We would then reload the structural model, which would make all the tags turn to question marks (rightfully so, since there are now two walls with different materials in exactly the same place...).

BUT, then we would go in to VG of the RVT link and shut off the struct walls, and they STAYED Question marks til we nudged them.

Fun game of cat and mouse, it became. :)

[angus.110169]

I agree that it happens when you change from Wireframe to hidden line. It is a serious problem for document control and it is almost worth considering using "dumb" tags as at least they will be consistent.

[mcuevas]

Has anyone received any new info on this? This is starting to get irritating……

[angus.110169]

My friend, it was irritating a long time ago...

[mcuevas]

We had someone select a material tag and then use select all to nudge them.........that select all really should not be so easy for people to accidentally use.... it made the tags in other views disappear. They were still there, but somehow hidden. You would have to use the select all method in each view to make them reappear in that view.......argh.......

So after going back and forth with autodesk support since 01/09, and then 3 or 4 different support techs, the techs going back to the development team twice, the development team telling me it was fixed in 2009, and then again saying it was fixed in 2010..... I finally got this message today...

Hi Miguel,

This issue was confirmed as an actual defect. Our development team is working to correct this on a future release. In the meantime please do not move the material tags if all instances have been selected.
I hope this helps.

Best regards,

Autodesk Support Team

Maybe Revit Architecture 2013 will address this issue.....

[cliff collins]

Any more info from Autodesk on this?

We are still experiencing Material Tags "going stale" and turning into ?.

Hope that RAC 2011 fixes this.......LOL

cheers........

[cliff collins]

Bump.......