Ha! Finally, I have achieved the goal of including annotation symbols in a schedule! The attached pdf is of one of our light fixture schedules....WITH annotations!
It is based around the creation of a new font. I copied Arial Narrow as a base, and added the necessary symbols to it with this program, FontCreator. I'm just "drawing over" the existing symbols we'll never need in a schedule.
Many symbols are taller than the maximum height of a line of text, so I had to break up the annotation into a couple modular characters, as seen above. (The program becomes easy to use once you get the hang of it!) These annotations took me a couple hours to put together (some of the time spent figuring out how). Still a work-in-progress...
This font is designated as the body of the schedule, and since it still has the standard alphabet, the schedule's normal data is unaffected.
I created a Shared Parameter called Schedule Symbol, which was placed in every family. I inserted the necessary character from the custom font into Word and assembled them, then I copy/pasted it into the family. You can copy/paste line breaks in this manner! It is also very important to keep a consistent character width, so they "stack" perfectly. I created them to be very modular, so I can piece together more complex symbols with them if need be.
The parameter value in Revit will appear as something crazy, like " àáâã ".
It takes some work, but the result is well worth it! I thought that it would display horribly, given how good Revit is with text, but it actually comes out looking very nice.
I assume you will have to send out this font for others to view it properly?? (if you share with others that is)
Just a bit of advice (remember it's free so you get what you pay for!), I have been down that road with specialized fonts in Autocad and had beautiful hand lettering fonts, customized fractions, etc. And got rid of them due to the aggravation of complaints from clients, etc.when they wanted to print out our drawings and got "?" on the plans. IF this is completely for your in-house use, that is another story.
It wasn't free, the program was purchased. We print in-house (hardcopy and/or electronic) and submit them. The company doesn't really want to just give this away for competitors to get. Honestly, I'm not concerned with protecting the font (or I wouldn't have posted it here), and I would give it to whoever could use it.. That's if I could. Besides, half the battle is incorporating it properly into Revit.
Just integrated this with our other projects and users. Works very well thus far - no issues and prints look closer to our standards!
I also took the opportunity to modify the Arial Narrow letter "I" for clarity (added top and bottom in our font):
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