Tuesday, January 03, 2012

Sorry You are Too Short

No I'm not picking on short people, that's Randy Newman's domain. Revit does have a bias against short lines (as most of us are well aware). Try sketching a line that's less than 1/32" long and you'll get this message.


It also doesn't care much for moving or copying elements very small distances. You may have run into this message?


What may not be obvious is that you can often trim a line to be shorter than the minimum size of 1/32". The threshold appears to be 1/128" (.16mm). In my experience this appears to work for most families such as annotation, detail component and generic model families. I've tried it in various project views including a drafting view without success. The project environment seems to be entirely intolerant of slipping past the 1/32" (0.780369mm) threshold. Trying to get smaller than that generates the first warning again.

If you want to copy/move something a smaller distance and get the warning, try dragging or using CTRL + Drag. You can get the arbitrary smaller distance and then use the temporary dimension to set the actual distance you want. Sometimes you can affect this limitation by zooming in closer, at least with regard to move or copy.

Fwiw, 1/128" converted to decimal is 0.00781250". I was able to make a line shorter still, to this decimal inch value 0.0063477", however Revit could not display anything other than 1/128" unless I changed the project units to decimal inches first using six decimal places. It is possible to create shorter lines than we are accustomed to (Revit limits) but only in family files.

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