Monday, October 20, 2008

Legends - Face Based Families

Short and sweet...they don't mix unfortunately. When they created the capability they either missed the fact that legends didn't support them or they decided the feature was more important than them working in Legends to hold them back. I'm glad we have FBF's. I'm not glad about or happy with the Legend feature set.

Legends are compromised by (at a minimum):

- Inability to transfer them between project files.
- Face Based Families do not work in them
- Tags cannot identify the elements displayed in them
- A sheet includes a legend in its "Scale" display evaluation.

An element in a Legend view should be "equal" to a real element but not affect quantity. That means tagging as well as dimensioning. The current implementation sacrifices bIm for graphic representation as well as ease and consistency of use.

3 comments:

David said...

Legends also can not include families from linked files.

So if one wanted to link several buildings into a main document project file one would have to load all of the families used into the main document project file separately and keep the loaded families consistant between linked files and the main document project file.

Aaron Maller said...

The "Phases of the past" Legends are great for all of the above. For now, im DONE playing with actual Legends... Except for notes i want on multiple sheets. And even that, im starting to use dependant views for...

Anonymous said...

I rarely use legends as well. If I need text I will create a schedule Key and use that, like my abbreviation list. This is a schedule key so it can be placed on multiple sheets and easily resized as needed.