Coded Notes (not keynotes)

[designviz]

Does Revit have a mechanism for placing Coded Notes (not keynotes)?

I am investigating to see if I can repurpose the Keynote tool to accomplish this task. However, not sure if this is the best approach.

From what I can surmise the Keynotes themselves are housed in a fairly simple and straight foward text file that it appears I can uniquely point to for each rvt file, and there is a family associated with the tag. In our particular case the coded notes themselves are sheet specific. What I may end up doing is just have a list of numbered values for placing the tags themselves and then handle the notes themselves within a text block on the sheet. Not very automated, or BIM like :) but could suffice.

If anyone is aware of another method, please advise.

For those not familar, refer to the attached PDF for reference. Coded Notes are usually 1-2 character sequential numbers usually within a hexagon, circle or square. They are typically sheet specific, though sometimes there maybe a "master list" and not tied specifications like keynotes are. They are more notes to the contractor and essentially they reduce the clutter of actual verbage on a drawing itself.

Ideally, it would be nice if Autodesk does not already have such a feature within Revit, and they develop one, to incorporate some automation, where at the discretion of the designer if there are no actual references to a particular coded note on a sheet, it would notify them and they could choose to keep it or delete it from the sheet. Also, in some cases the same coded note would be applied on multiple sheets, and thus you may have a "master list" of notes, where Revit could scan the sheet and based on the tags found generate the Coded Notes legend from the master list. Also, the coded notes would need to accomidate multi-line text, which it does not appear the keynote mechanism is designed for...

[jeffh]

You can use a note block for this functionality. It works exactly as you are describing. There is a section on note blocks in the tutorials.

[dmoodydesign]

You can use a note block for this functionality. It works exactly as you are describing. There is a section on note blocks in the tutorials.

I'm having trouble getting this to work as you say it should. I want to tag multiple items on a sheet with keynotes 1-10. The items tagged will change sheet to sheet, but will always be numerical and start 1-10. The associated notes for 1-10 will also change sheet to sheet. How is this possible and keep everything tied together as much as possible? I don't like using generic annotation symbols, as they don't link or tie to anything in the model, but it appears this is as close as you can get. Ideas?

[jeffh]

Note Blocks are going to probably be the best way to do this. Having different numbers with different text is not a problem using note blocks because they are annotation objects and thus sheet specific. The 1 note can literally anything on any sheet, etc, etc... when you make the note block you will need to include the "sheet" field as a hidden field so you can create a corresponding noteblock for each sheet. The coordinatyion of these are unfortunatly a manual process.

I have attached an example project with a notes and note blocks on each sheet. I have also included a combined note block not filtering by sheet so if you did have a project wide set of notes it could be done like this.

[dmoodydesign]

Thanks, this was essentially what I had minus the Sheet Name parameter. Not that I like this method 100% we are still going to try it out. It would be nice if the Annotation, which is sheet specific, would function like Keynotes and have a Sort by Sheet box to check. *sigh*

[designviz]

Jeff, thank you for the explaination and better yet an actual example to look at. I will take a look at this hopefully in the next few days.

I realize the manual process involved in this. Ideally if we went to true keynoting, this mechanism potentially would not be necessary, however we are still sort of in that limbo state between the BIM ideal and the BIM reality. The gap is narrowing, but a gap does remain due to a number of factors, not the least of which is "well this is the way we have always done it, why should we change." :)

[jeffh]

...not the least of which is "well this is the way we have always done it, why should we change." :)

Sometimes that is the BIGGEST gap that must be leaped.