Tag Archives: Quirk

Revit Railing Support Bug

I have been teaching and using the hack to use railing supports in leiu of baluster or to use them for gates etc.  Yesterday a client told be about an issue with Railing Supports, they do not abide by phasing graphic overrides.  In cases where the supports are simple brackets (as shown below this probably isn’t that big of a deal.

Railing Support Phasing Issue 0

However when you are utilizing support for balusters or for gates (as shown in the two images below) this becomes a big issue.  This has been reported to Autodesk and I was able to reproduce the issue in both Revit 2017 & 2016, I didn’t test it in older versions of Revit.

Railing Support Phasing Issue 1

Railing Support Phasing Issue 2

Revit 2017 View Range Quirk

The new features that we received as part of Revit 2017 for View Range were actually part of 2016 R2, with one exception.  In 2017 the factory gave us a 2 key shortcut (VR) to activate it.  This is, maybe I should say was, one of my favorite new little features for this release.  However I found a bug when using the shortcut instead of accessing it through the properties dialog.  If you use VR to access the dialog you Must use apply dialog for it to work clicking OK wont accept changes.  Aaron Maller and I also discovered that you can access the view range via VR even when there is a view template assigned.  Simply applying the view template to the view wont correct the problem you must make a change in the view template and it will then overwrite the settings.  These quirks forced me to no longer say this is one of my favorite small enhancements.

Revit 2017 Text Editor vs Tag

I recently posted about the issues that will arise when upgrading a project from Revit 2016 to Revit 2017.  Upon further investigating there is a significant quirk when comparing text to tags.  I was updating a detail container file for one of my clients where they use mostly Keynote tags with a bit of text alongside for more clarifications.  At first glance it may not be noticeable, however if you zoom out you can see a difference and if you make the a text value match the tag value it is easily seen on screen.

2017 Text Quirk 1

If you look closely at the screen capture above you may notice that the top line of text looks a bit more pixelated (ironically it was more noticeable in a screen capture then on the Revit screen).  As seen in the capture below it becomes more noticeable the further you zoom out in Revit, it almost looks as though the text is bold and the tag is not.

2017 Text Quirk 2

To really make a comparison I typed a piece of text (shown in blue below) directly over the tag (shown in black) and as you can see the text is spacing, or kerning, is larger in text than tags as well as the height being slightly taller.

2017 Text Quirk 3

I had thought that maybe this was an issue with updating the project and the tag as well.  I created a new tag from the 2017 template and the same thing occurred.  I don’t envision this causing many issues with upgraded projects but something I think should be addressed by the Factory if future releases.

 

Revit 2017 Text Editor quirks

By now I am sure most of you have heard about the all new text editor in Revit 2017.  If notSteve has covered the new features and Paul has posted a Lynda video on the features.  I have yet to hear anyone talk about the issues with it when a file is upgraded.  Last year at several conferences Autodesk said that when there was a new text editor they may be an issue when a file is upgraded.  The help file even lists this as a warning under the What’s New:

Important: After upgrade, review all views and sheets to verify the changes to your text instances. See Upgrade Information for Revit for more information. ”  When looking at the Upgrade Information for Revit page it is the first thing listed and an additional warning to verify all upgraded projects.

I can say with assurance that yes I am seeing issues when upgrading projects.  The real issue that I have been noticing is the text boxes are getting larger in height when a project is upgraded.

 

2017 Text Quirk

I had a suspicion that something like this would happen which is why I have been suggesting to all my clients that is a project is in an early phase consider upgrading prior to adding a lot of text.  I always hope that most users are using less text and more tags so there may be less things to fix.

Revit 2016 R2 Structural Beams to Columns

With the R2 version of 2016 Revit we were introduced to Global Parameters.  As Dezi and myself have been looking into how to utilize them she noticed a nice quirk related to them.  Previously I have posted about beams and associating them to columns and then clarified that post with a follow up.  When entering a value for the attachment distance Revit will only allow this to be a positive value, which will move the beam towards the center of the column.  Dezi had noticed that if a global parameter is associated you can enter a negative value

2016 R2 start attachment Global Parameter

Now I want users to try and use Global Parameters and see if they can use them were we can’t have a negative value.  If you find them please comment to this blog.