Revit- Renaming Views with Special Characters

Recently a coworker of mine discovered a weird glitch with Revit. It pertained to view naming.

If you have ever tried to rename a view with the following characters, \:{}[]|;<>? or any non printable characters. Your promptly receive this error.

He discovered that this restriction does not exist when creating a new drafting view, but has a major issue when involving the <>

I illustrate the issue below. (Just so you all know, I have sent the error previously as well.)

Assign Arrowheads Across Whole Revit Project

Every now and then I will jump into a developed model and notice that users have created custom text types or keynote tags, Often times these text types and keynote tags will not be using the standard arrowhead type we use at our company.
There are several reasons this could happen,(copying details, to add something to the keynote tag, different text style, etc).
In Revit, the arrowhead style is a type parameter which is both a good and bad thing. If you have a very developed model with a bunch of different types, this could take what seems like forever.
Thankfully we have Dynamo to save us. See below for a video of the first Rhythm tool in action.

In the video I illustrate that all the text and keynotes are different types. Select the types to exclude (important if you need specific arrowhead types), and select the arrowhead type for Dynamo to apply after it selects all of them for the whole model.



-JohnP

Rhythm.Tools for DynamoBIM

This week I will have a few posts regarding some new tool nodes for DynamoBIM. These tools have a heavy focus on documentation tasks and will be presented to 505BUG on Thursday.

Here are the tools I will be explaining over the next few days.

Arrowhead Assigner

 

Upper Case Text for Everything

Sheet Dash Remover (previously discussed here)

Automate your graphic scale on viewports!

stay tuned..

ʎɐp slooɟ lᴉɹdɐ

In the spirit of today, I published a new node in Rhythm called String.FlipReverse.

This node will take strings as input and make them appear upside down. This works best on Dynamo 0.8.0 because they added unicode support with this release. It also doesn’t function for every punctuation character at this point.

You can find this on the package manager, and below is an animation showing it in action as well. 

Have fun!

-JohnP 

Revit- Generic Annotations, Get a grip!

If you have ever worked in the family editor in Revit, you have probably became aware that all family templates and types are not created equal.

This post will specifically cover the category of generic annotation. Often times we add stretch handles to our families to allow them to flex and shape, unfortunately that is not the case with generic annotations (symbols).

If you have ever tried to copy a reference plane into a generic annotation it simply does not work. You are greeted with the following message.

After some trial and error, I have finally found the family that does allow you to copy reference planes. This is the view title family!

In the video below, I demonstrate how this process works. (Currently the grip handles only work properly in “paper space”. I believe when used in the live views it multiplies the length by the scale factor.)