Tag Archives: Tips

Thin Lines Bluebeam

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For those of us that are Revit users we are very familiar with the “Thin Lines” button.  This disables the line weights and displays all lines with out any thickness.  What I stumbled upon today was the ability to so the same in Bluebeam, assuming the .pdf is generated from a program like Revit, AutoCAD, Microstation etc.  The tool in Bluebeam is called “Disable Line Weights”, it isn’t upfront and center and unless you try to customize the interface you may never find the tool.  To activate this command  either Right Click on a toolbar or go to the View Ribbon tab and hit the arrow next to the Toolbars icon

bluebeam_toolbars_customize

Once in the Customize Toolbar dialog box:

  1. Change the Categories: to All
  2. Scroll down to select “Disable Line Weights”
  3. Select the toolbar to add the command too
  4. Click the “Add Command” button

bluebeam_toolbars_dialog

You now have the command available on that toolbar.  Use these steps to discover other tools you may not have know existed.

Ironically found this when trying to find the keyboard shortcuts, which by the way can easily be found in the help.

bluebeam_keyboardshortcuts

Revit Keyboard Shortcuts

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When a new release of Revit comes out there are a few things I check into. One of those things are keyboard shortcuts to see if their are any new tools that may have not been documented. While in Revit 2017 I noticed there is a new set of Rotate shortcuts (they were there in 2016, I must have missed them): Rotate 45, Rotate 90, Rotate 180

Revit 2017 Keyboard Shortcuts Rotate

Of course upon seeing this I wanted to test it in the project environment, I did however notice that it was a “Contextual Tab” tool, which means this is a command that is only used when a given object is selected and not part of the Rotate Command.  I decided to see if I could find it in the Help  upon which I was reminded about a link in the Help files that I forgot was there.  Autodesk has been nice enough to supply a download of all the keyboard shortcuts, both in an Excel form as well as PDF form.

Revit 2017 Keyboard Shortcuts Help

When looking at either of the files you will notice a column displaying the Command ID, which will show us what the command is associated too.

Revit 2017 Keyboard Shortcuts Excel

After looking at this it was obvious that the was released as part of the MEP Fabrication assembly features.  Hopefully the fact that I re-found the Keyboard Shortcut Excel file will help others.

Revit 2017 Calculated Values in Tags

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Steve has posted about the capability to add calculated values in tags.  While I have disparaging feelings about this feature and using for things like Occupant loads (since there is a possibility to have them not match the calculated value in the schedule).  I did find a use that I can get behind.  When tagging a value that is a length or number we can set the units to be 0 decimal places or round to the nearest inch, when doing this with a label using “Edit Parameter’s Units Format” button it will use true rounding so a 0.4 value would come in at 0.0.

2017 Tag Units

I had a client asking about when their analytical software imports the load values they are often set to 3 decimal places, however on plan they always want to show these values rounded to the higher value. In 2017 we now can add formulas to tags to accomplish this task, “roundup(Value)” where Value is a parameter associated to the family and roundup (or rounddown) is the formula.

2017 Tag Formula

Revit 2017 Fill Patterns

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Today while generating some new fill patterns I noticed a small new enhancement to Revit 2017, which I didn’t ever see in the documentation of what’s new.

We now have the capability to stretch the “Modify Pattern Properties” dialog box when generating fill patterns.  This means we can now actually see the patter if is a bit larger is spacing.  It really is the little things that make me smile when I discover them.

2017 Fill Pattern Dialog Box

Revit 2017 Floor Tags

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In a previous release of Revit (2015 it believe) we gained the capability to add the elevation of a floor.  Not only the elevation but the elevation of the bottom or top, if the floor was structural then we also had Bottom Core or Top Core.  This worked great except the fact the it was always using the internal elevation for the value it was representing.  We couldn’t use the survey point (shared coordinates) thus most people still used spot elevations for reporting elevations.  In 2017 they snuck in the survey point option when creating a tag.

2017 Tag Floor

This feature was also added for Structural Foundations, it would be nice to see all categories with an elevation option to have this added, including ducts, structural framing, structural beam systems etc..