Dept. of Subtle - Illegal Characters

I'm not referring to characters in a play, novel or movie but the characters we use in filenames. Revit will complain if you attempt to use them to name a view, sort of.

If you create a drafting view and use something like "1/2:12" it won't complain. Try to rename it and you'll be in trouble with Revit. An odd quirky item to be sure.

In general you don't want (I think you don't) to use these characters for view names because they get used to export to dwg/ifc/pdf etc. These characters will create errors when Revit tries to create the file using them. Don't use them in your title block drawing titles either for the same reason. I decided to post this after reading a post at RevitForum asking if anyone else had noticed the subtle name>rename peculiarity.

Curiously...no such complaint when you do the same thing with Legend Views, hmmm.

Central File Naming

I've always recommended appending the word "Central" to the file name of a project that is using Worksets. I've done this because I want to make the file "special" or distinctive to users. With the new Local File process I described in yesterday's post I find myself rethinking this habit.

Revit will append the username to the Local File for us so we don't have to worry about the Central and Local files having the same name (technically Revit doesn't care about this though). We do have to acknowledge that putting "Central" in the file name will remain in the file name plus the username, for Local Files.

A couple examples would help?

Using my established recommendation:
Our Big Project-central.rvt [Central File on server]
Our Big Project-central_username.rvt [Local File on local pc]
Our Big Project-central_username_ddmmyyyy_hhmmss.rvt [additional files]

Abandoning my recommendation:
Our Big Project.rvt [Central File on server]
Our Big Project_username.rvt [Local File on local pc]
Our Big Project_username_ddmmyyyy_hhmmss.rvt [additional files]

I offer this as something to consider. If most of your projects have Worksets enabled anyway then perhaps making the file name "distinctive" isn't as important as it might seem?

No Periods, Period!

If you used Periods in your file names AND numbers you are asking for trouble.

Here are three examples:
Project.0921.rvt
Project-Central.454.rvt
Project-Steve.0921.rvt

When you save a file named this way you'll get this error message:



Just don't use periods. She'll be right mate!