Revit 2015 Double Click Deactivate View

The new companion to double-click to activate a view on a sheet is pretty simple. Just double-click outside the extent of the viewport to deactivate it. Double-click to Activate View works on schedules too, it opens the schedule editing window. Hopefully it's pretty obvious that double-click to Deactivate View won't work, in reverse, on the schedule once you are editing.

By the way, it (double-click to Deactivate View) can't be turned off. There is an option to disable the Activate View behavior. If you happen to change it to Do Nothing. If you use right-click to Activate View you'll find that Double-click to Deactivate View works regardless.

Deactivate View just don't care.

2014 Revit OpEd

Viewport Title Line

The line that appears along with a Viewport, when you place a view on a sheet, is a property of each viewport type. You get to decide whether you want it to show up or not. It is also the reason you must select the viewport to alter the length of the line, not the view's title annotation, a common mistake or assumption.

Revit will make the line as long as the length (horizontal distance) of the viewport when you place it on a sheet. If you're not careful to clean up a view before adding it to sheet you'll end up with a title line that's far longer than you really wanted.

In some cases people only want the line to be as long as the length of the text in the title. There is no correlation between the title value and the length of the line. It's a close enough situation. You can take a different approach. The font assigned to each view title annotation family can use the Underline option.

Turn off the Viewport title line and alter the viewport's view title family. Reload and you'll get something like this automatically, every time.

Keep in mind the above only deals with the line, not the length of the label itself which affects how soon the text will wrap. You might be able to get away with making the label really long to avoid wrapping at all. More often we need to nest a few labels of different widths to all for short, long and longest title situations where the text should or should not wrap. We then create parameters and types to define which label should be visible. Each type is then associated with a specific Viewport type in the project.

Remember, new to Revit 2015, we can include our own Shared Parameters in Viewport title families. This means we can easily include other kinds of information in a viewport title now. This was a bit more cumbersome in the past.

Testing a plageriser's feed...

2014 Revit OpEd

Show Title Option

Revit viewports have a parameter called "Show Title". The Type Properties dialog offers us "Yes", "No" and "When multiple viewports". This post deals with the wordy one.

The "When multiple viewports" option is meant to make it easier to leave off a view title when you are only putting one view on the sheet. Most of the time the sheet title is the same as the viewport title, like for overall plans. Seems a bit redundant to put a view title on too?

Unfortunately using it means we have to give up the option of having the viewport title extension line snapping into alignment with other viewport extension lines. I'm referring to the line that shows up when you check the box for "Show Extension Line".

If you are used to these lines snapping into alignment with one another, they won't when you use the "When multiple viewports" option. I captured a short video to help see it in action.

Dept. of Unfair - Move Tool is Insensitive

When they added the Guide Grid feature to Revit they made it possible to snap to Grid intersections (and Reference Planes) through a viewport. This means we can move a viewport into the same location from one sheet to the next based on an agreed grid intersection such, "A1 will be what we use as a reference location to put our floor plan views on the sheet the same way."

They added this after many years of hearing users complain about views not lining up on sheets. Me personally, I got over it early. Seemed to me that far fewer sheets were affected by this concern than the number of sheets that weren't. I don't mind having the feature but it just never bothered me. I could get things close enough that nobody would notice, especially working with real paper in hand. Granted it is easier to tell in the digital world "flipping" pdf pages or comparing a CAD file overlay. For me though, it didn't really amount to a hill of beans in the job trailer. As a contractor in the past I was more worried about information actually being on the sheet at all to be worried about whether they stacked from sheet to sheet exactly.

Oops I digress...

In order to make this possible they needed to make Revit more sensitive to the contents of the viewport when using the Move Tool. Unfortunately Revit seems to think we live in an orthogonal world because the only Grids or Reference Planes the tool "sees" are orthogonal ones. No arcs, no grids at an angle, sorry Charlie. Now it isn't hard to place a couple orthogonal Reference Planes somewhere or to choose a different Grid intersection perhaps but it would be nice if Revit was more malleable, enough to let us pick any intersection of Grids or Reference Planes.

From Autodesk's WikiHelp:

Item 7. Snap to the crop regions or datums in the viewports and move them into alignment with the guide grid lines to specify a precise location on the sheet. (bold emphasis mine)

This means we can forget about the datum stuff (Grids/Reference Planes) and use the Crop Region. Of course the Crop Region has to be visible to snap to it and unless you are using a Scope Box to manage the Crop Region (to keep them consistent for many views) it isn't really the most reliable reference point to use either. Here's a visual aid, a short video discussing it too.