Revit 2017 Text Glitch Intermittent

[Anonymous]

Creating a new post for this one, since it's a bit different than the other one.

A friend called me yesterday to discuss an issue she was having with the Text Editor.  She uses the ALT+ keystrokes quite a bit and they were not working for her.  After testing myself I came to the same conclusion.  BTW, she is on Windows 7 and I am on Windows 10, OS is not a factor.

What we have found is upon first attempting to add a special character nothing happens or you are kicked out of the text editor.  After a few attempts Revit finally "gets it" and then you can add that particular character numerous times, then suddenly Revit forgets and nothing happens.  Sometimes you can close out of the text editor after you add a text string, then edit and you can add in the special character.  This is happening with an upgraded project and fresh projects from the 2017 template.

Another issue with upgraded projects, is "sometimes" the Text Type Properties are grayed out and you cannot edit.  After a few attempts of unselecting the text and reselecting it works.  I put emphasis on "sometimes" as I opened the same project I upgraded yesterday today and let it upgrade and now I can select the text properties without issues, but the special characters issue remains.

[Anonymous]

Created screencast..

[kathryn.langan]

Thanks for the video.

I think I see what's happening. It looks like during the times that the character is not inserting, the ALT key is triggering the display of the UI keyboard shortcuts - it looks like if you are holding the ALT key too long before pressing the numbers, it triggers that shortcut instead, and then it won't insert the character.

I tested and the ALT functionality appears to have been disabled when editing text in 2016, but not in 2017. I have submitted this to our development team for further investigation.

I have created the following article on our Knowledge Network that you can use to track the status of the investigation:

Inconsistent behavior attempting to insert special characters in Revit 2017 when using keyboard shor...

It can take a little time before the article is published externally, so if the link does not work, please check again later today.

Thanks for letting us know!

[Anonymous]

Thanks @kathryn.langan

[arcitekt]

Kathryn:

I have similar problems with text editor but slightly different.  After using the text editor for a while in Revit 2017, the editor suddenly stops working correctly.  The curser jumps around, arrow keys work in opposite directions, you can type but it gets inserted where the software wants, you can randomly delete text where the software wants to.  I have tried a usb keyboard thinking it was a driver, but behaves the same as my bluetooth keyboard thinking. But no go.  Typically the editor first stops working when editing a view on an open sheet.  Sometimes if you open the view independently the text editor works again.  But no such luck today.  Closing out of the software and restarting usually works.

My computer:  2013 MacPro, Windows 10 OS and Bootcamp. This was never a problem in 2016 and 2015 versions of Revit.

Also on another note. I cannot create pdf's on either of my 2 machines.  Sometimes you create one pdf, but when you print a second sheet, the Adobe distiller is working but it never goes past 30%. You can even invoke many more prints without any result. The work around is a hardship to export as as a full size png and then convert back to pdf.  Ultimately I hope this is not the final solution.

[mp_thompson]

@arcitekt it's a known bug with 2017 that Autodesk are aware of (the text issue)

[Anonymous]

I have also noticed that some alt codes no longer work like they did before, for example

alt+8541 would give me 5/8 in a top fraction from, but I get a bracket ]

is the possible a list of alt codes somewhere that work better with revit 2015-2017