Revit 2011: Stacked Fractions? Centerline & Plate symbols?

[Anonymous]

It's 2011. Autodesk has crippled backwards compatibility to get everyone to pay continuously for 'subscription services'. The least they can do is produce a decently useable product. Any word on any hacks/workarounds to use stackable fractions and various custom symbols as text?

[kirbybeegles4894]

Some symbols are available in the character map of your operating system, and can be pretty easily inserted using ALT +  (a 4 number combination), but I  think that these are pretty much limited to Latin letters, degree symbol, diameter, etc.  Definitely an unfortunate limitation of REVIT and in my opinion the biggest drawback of using it instead of CAD to produce construction documents.  I'd love to know if someone from Autodesk has a technical response as to why the text editor in REVIT is so archaic and hasn't been updated significantly at all since its inception.  I noticed recently that AUGI punished it's wishlist, which is voted on by the users, and for all 3 REVIT platforms, a better text editor was the #1 request.

[Anonymous]

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Autodesk-Revit-Structure/Bug-with-2010-Text-Editor/m-p/2480150/highlig...

The link above shows that the unicode method has hit some errors too. Also is doesn't have nearly the amount of symbols required. 1/16th fractions, and symbols. I remember when AutoCAD had the AEC tools almost 20 years ago that could do this easily. I could document something much better back in 1990 with AutoCAD R14. A shame that autodesk turned its back on its own extensive experience and programming in trying to get the next AutoCAD.

It's strange that Autodesk is forcing users to get the latest release. This goes against industry practices and we all know from experience that a proprietarily driven approach is doomed to fail. No firm wants to continually spend resources on re-training staff, purchasing new equipment, or updating standards and procedures. It's bad business practice to fix things that are not broken and I hope Autodesk realizes this. Ridiculous to drop $6000+ a license and pay yearly subscription fees with a sub-par product. Engineers must maintain data integrity through decades not months. I need to be able to work with documents without worrying about software releases and backwards compatibility. I might as well go back to pdfs or paper documents the way Revit is headed.