Friday, April 22, 2016

Revit 2017 - Upgrading Text Warning

In my earlier review of the text editor I included this warning:
When you upgrade from older projects you're going to have to deal with text changing to reconcile these changes. That means you CAN'T upgrade a project a couple days before a major deadline and expect to just hit print.
I should have also said that means anything that has text in it, like tags, title blocks and so on...

My post mentions that text height is defined differently, more like AutoCAD. The help documentation offers a graphic and an explanation of what has changed. I also marked up this image from Dynamic Statements to indicate how the text height is defined now. The overall height is based upon the capital letter M, measured from Base Line to Cap Height (for M). That's apparently more like how AutoCAD does it.


Brian Mackey (The Revit Geek's Blog) has written two posts about what he's observed happen with an upgrade so far. This is the FIRST and this is the SECOND post. Damien Ferlazzo (Revit Link blog) shares his experience upgrading text so far with his POST. Check out their posts.

I've also read a couple of threads in forums from users sharing what has happened with their TEST RUNS at upgrading. I emphasize that TEST RUNS because at this point that is exactly what we should be doing.
Please, please, pretty please with sugar on top...don't upgrade and expect to just carry on without reviewing everything very carefully. You (we all) have some text fixing to do!
P.S. As I was finishing this post I just heard from someone that they are having some issues trying to use the ALT codes for special characters via Character Map. I also heard that some text types were not editable at first but closing the view and opening it again helped for some reason. I'm sure there will be more to come as more people start using it seriously.

4 comments:

DaveP said...

Just ran a deep test on our Template file.
Our default font is Arial Narrow, which gets a little bit wider with the upgrade, so there's going to be a lot of fixing. :-(

One thing in particular I noticed is that, while left-justified Text is mostly OK with getting wider, a lot of our right-justified Text no long fit in it's box, and now wraps to two lines. Easy to fix by stretching the box, but its going to be a LOT of "easy" fixing.

DT said...

I have come across some more unusual behaviour. The center justification text box shifts the characters off center if reduced to its limits. This doesn't happen in Revit 2016. I posted something about it here. I was trying to fix one of my families when I came across it... bit wierd.
http://revitlink.blogspot.com.au/2016/07/revit-2017-text-justification.html

Unknown said...

Anyone ever come up with a conversion chart for fonts for this? I seem to remember seeing one at some point, but the only link I can find now from what revit wants doesn't appear to exist anymore.
Thanks in Advance.

Steve said...

Dave - A conversion chart? Do you mean fonts that work better than others at being upgraded? If so, not that I've heard mention of.