Self annotating families

[PeterJ]

Has anyone worked with self-annotating families? I'm interested to make use of this facility but I'd be grateful for any comments that others have.

[beegee]

The ones I used, "out of the box", gave me major headaches with text size and text appearing where I didn't want it in a view, so I modified 'em by deleting the text.
I think there was a bug in those particular families though ( Domestic equipment )

[PeterJ]

Thanks beegee, I'll take a look at them.

I agree there appear to be weaknesses in as much as I can only control placement of the text in the family and not in the model afterwards, which seems a problem. My bigger issue is that at present I seem unable to place annotation in section views and that is probably where it will be of greatest use to me. Did you overcome that?

[beegee]

Yes, that was my problem. Invariably the text was not where I wanted it for whatever reason. For example, in a commercial Laundry with banks of Washers and Dryers, it may be necessary to shift just one or two annotations to allow other elements to read correctly. So I decided I had more control just adding text.

I havn't tried annotation families in section though.

[gnl]

I tried making some self annotating families, mainly furniture, where the text is a nested generic annotation whose parameters are controlled directly in the model family, thus in the project itself.
Never tried them in section though, only in plan views...

[Steve_Stafford]

I've made one family using this feature. The difficulty I encountered trying to take advantage of it is my office likes to see the annotation in several different view scales. So I find you get the text size and position working for one but it doesn't look right in the next scale up.

My solution was to use different text objects with different sizes and then position each as desired. I then used Coarse/Medium/Fine to govern their display. So I succeeded as long as each display level was compatible to the intended "look" of the family.

[sbrown]

I agree these don't work so well. We did a sim. thing to Steve, opened each family and made the text off in coarse and medium, that gave us almost enough flexiblilty. But it would be much nicer if they just went on an object style within the family so you could turn them off individually.

[Steve_Stafford]

Great opportunity for that new feature: ON/OFF parameter in families