Thank you all for your replies.
Yes, staggering the flights of stairs is our preferred solution, too. As a matter of fact, in the jpgs I posted, the floor level landing has the up and down runs staggered, although the intermediate landing does not, just as a consequence of the floor-to-floor height that happened to occur between the levels.
After a while, I figured out there has to be a connector piece of railing, which is not part of the railings hosted by either the up or down runs of stairs, at a height that will meet those railings - and the railing from the jogged flight has to be extended towards the landing in order to make everything meet. This isn't really explained anywhere - it's still kind of baffling to me why Revit will create the connection at the intermediate landing but not at the floor level landings, especially if it's a multi-level stair.
My other issue has been with the handrail extensions required by code (at the outside walls), which are 12" at the top of a flight of stairs, and 12" plus one tread depth at the bottom (usually 12" + 11" = 23"). By default, Revit draws one continuous railing starting at the first nosing of the first step, continuing around the outside of the landing, and ending at the last nosing of the last step. For a plain, functional stair in an exit enclosure, normally the handrail isn't continuous like this - there's one along one flight of steps, and a second one along the other. So the path of the default handrail has to be edited, eliminating everything except the piece along one flight, adding the extensions, and then a second handrail drawn in along the other flight.
Easy enough, but the problem occurs when trying to dimension the extensions. Revit often refuses to recognize the handrail extensions as valid dimension references. Sometimes this can be fixed by manipulating the view range, making the depth lower so that it will "see" the handrail going down from the current level (even though it displays anyway). But other times, no amount of fiddling with the view range will make the handrail extensions dimensionable. This seems to occur with the second handrail that had to be added in after eliminating the default "wraparound" handrail.
Without these dimensions, the project cannot be approved in plan check. I've seen posts on other groups where people actually "fixed" this by adding in a reference plane just to get something that Revit would accept as a dimension reference, but I was hoping there would be a solution to this problem that was less of a kluge.
You might guess this is my first time trying to do a project in Revit that has enclosed exit stairs like this. It's pretty daunting. Reading over the posts in various user groups, it seems like the stair tool is one thing users love to hate about Revit. I'd like to think a lot of this struggle is attributable to my own inexperience, but this aspect of the software, at least, has the definite whiff of "Version 0.9" about it.
Thanks,
Michael Evans
