Updating Your Existing Content To Reflect The Updates In Revit 2009

It is now the middle of 2008, and with all of the Autodesk Releases of new products, we have some work to do. If you have not done so, go ahead and read the welcome screen of your 2009 product. In this case I am talking about the new features of the Revit products. If you look past all the hype about rendering you are going to see that there are some useful new things to know about the changes that were made to parameters. In this release, there is a change in the way that parameters are handled which affects everyone on the Revit platform, whether you are Architecture, MEP or Structure.

If you have not done so yet, take a look at the new features workshop. Read it through at least once. If you find that you don’t have the time, well, then you don’t have time to be more productive! In addition to the program enhancements, this release of Revit allows you to make changes to the Revit API. This gives me a bit of déjà vu here (Remembering ACAD LISP, but not quite the same).

However, this is not going to be the focus of this article. Rather, the focus will actually be on updating your existing content to reflect the updates made to the program. So, get out your templates and take a look at what I am going to show you.
In the earlier releases of Revit, you created a title block family:

In the family editor, I loaded up a title block family from the Imperial library on the 2009 release. Everything looks the same, but if you have edited a family lately, you have noticed that with the advent of multi-parameter labels, you can now have less error-prone labels and tags. Go ahead and click on one of the parameter labels such as the client name, click on “edit label” and you will see that I can now place multiple parameters in a single label.

So, what does this all equate to? As far as title blocks go, below is an example.

Before multi-parameter labels:

This happens because you didn’t place enough spacing between the parameter labels that you added. Even if you’ve added enough space for all labels, you may still run into this if one of the names is too long. In addition to this problem, you may have encountered something similar to this:

In cases like these room tags, I have to make them as compact as possible because once my drawing gets to CDs, I won’t be able to fit the rest of the annotation as I would like. I’m not saying that you cannot work around this issue; you could change the text justification, text size or move the line up to make the names fit. The thing to do here is to add a multi-parameter label.

In the case of the title block for example, I will add a single label that takes care of all the project information. That way, no matter how much I type, Revit will wrap the text as needed, and will also automatically place the label on the next line for you if you so choose. So, get your old title block, replace all those labels and combine them so that you can now have much more flexibility with the amount of text you place and where Revit places the text. Delete those separated labels as I did here:

Now, edit that label. Click “edit label” and place all of those parameters in a single label like so:

Make sure that you leave “Wrap between parameters only” unchecked and you check the boxes below break as shown. The same applies to all your tags. Wherever you have more than one parameter in a tag, it would be beneficial to add those as multi-parameter labels. Make sure you have your CAD manager go through all of the existing library tags and title blocks and see where the tags may need editing. Autodesk has updated the content, but for those that are upgrading and have a custom library, you probably enjoy the predictability of your own families that you created in the past.

On a final note, take a look at your revision schedule in the new 2009 title block. It also has been improved for less troublesome operation. It already has the lines included in it, so if you happen to type out a lengthy revision, the lines will update and the text will also carry over properly. This also allows me to make my title block narrower so I can fit more drawings on my sheet.