Disappearing Wall Tags

[Darin_HDR]

I'm using Revit 2017

I'm getting some weird behavior and was wondering if anyone has seen this type of behavior or know what might be causing it. On multiple different projects, when I print to pdf the wall tags (I have created) do not show up on the created pdf. After creating the pdf, I go back and check the sheet in the model and sure enough, they show up. I try to recreate the anomaly (print to pdf again) under the same circumstances and the wall tags show up in the pdf. This has behavior has resulted in creating construction documents without wall tags (which is not good). I don’t turn off/hide wall tags really ever and again, after creating the pdf I have gone right back to the sheet to check and the wall tags are all visible.

Not sure if this is a glitch with Revit, my wall tag, something else I am inadvertently doing. Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Just for kicks, I have also attached my wall tag if there is anyone brainy enough to want to try to dissect it to see if they think it might be the culprit (but again it does seem to work for the most part).

Thanks in advance!

[m.voss.alvine]

is it that all wall tags dont print on just in certain areas?

[Darin_HDR]

They are all gone from the view. Does this mean they are all gone from one view on a sheet and not another view on the same sheet, I don't know, I haven't had two views with wall tags on the same sheet where I have seen this behavior.  But when the wall tags disappear from a printed (to pdf) sheet, they are all gone, not just some of them.

[ToanDN]

- 1st: Audit the file
- 2nd: If the problem persists, cut and paste the wall tags in-place for each view

[Darin_HDR]

- Opened file with Audit and no results were shown (not sure if that means everything is okay and if it only shows results of the audit when it finds errors).

- Selected all wall tags visible in view and cut to get this error message: Selection cannot be copied. Can't Copy to Clipboard because of relationships between Elements

I can cut and paste in place each individual wall tag but doing that 200 times and keeping track of which ones have been cut and which ones haven't, isn't really a workable solution.

Any other thoughts are appreciated and I will let you know if I see this issue continue after the audit and partial cut and paste.

[ToanDN]

1. Did you run a print to PDF after opening the File with Audit?
2. I am not sure why you wasn't able to cut and paste all wall tags visible in View. If you can only do one by one then it isn't really feasible. However, as a test, if you can try a couple of tags and re-print the drawing just to see if those will print.

[Darin_HDR]

I did run a print to pdf after the audit and everything looked good. However that is not a good indication of if the problem is fixed as wall tags showing up is the norm and them being hidden only happens periodically. It is really hard to recreate the problem since I don't know what the trigger is.

It is like I am printing with the tags hidden but I have literally seen the tags not show up in a pdf I just created, checked the view on the sheet to see if they are in fact hidden (they are not) printed to pdf again to see if I can recreate the hidden tag and it shows up in the new pdf.

Something else odd, so I tried select all visible wall tags again and was able to cut and paste some types in a family but received this same error on other types (same type I got the error message before) when I tried to select all visible in a view. Not sure why I could do this with one type but not another type when it is the same family?

[ToanDN]

Also, you have a masking region set to invisible in the family. If it is there doing nothing then get rid of it.

[Darin_HDR]

The masking region was there as originally I wanted to have the tag mask lines that might run behind it. It seems though that I wasn't using it in the sent version of this file, but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't ever go back into the family and make the masking region visible (used) at some point. While I agree, miscellaneous unused elements should always be removed from families, this particular one does serve a purpose and I don't feel is the the culprit of the problem.

[Judy_S]

Hi, Darin,

I'm Judy, a Revit specialist, and I'll be happy to help you with the pdf print problem with room tags. I'm sure this is really frustrating! I don't think it's an issue with the tag itself. Here are a couple of ideas that may be helpful:

1. First, auditing the model may have fixed the problem (or not- as you said, it happens sporadically so you don't know yet. Incidentally, audit works in the background and doesn't display any messages about what, if anything, it found and fixed. If it finds something and fixes it, and that thing happens to be what the problem is, you'll see better performance; it may also fix something that hasn't become a big enough problem to become visible to you, so occasional auditing is a good thing to do.)

2. Printing is memory intensive, and your temp folder may have a lot of stuff in it. Please try emptying your temp folder. First, close all Revit sessions. Then, in the Windows Start menu, type %temp%. Delete everything inside this folder (skip those items that can't be deleted - these aren't a problem) and try again. If there were a lot of things in the temp folder, this could be the culprit; weird, "illogical" behavior like you're seeing often is a symptom of a temp folder with a lot of files in it. Emptying your temp folder about once a week or so will help keep Revit running smoothly.

3. When printing, it's a good idea to do so in a new Revit session, as Revit's memory can get filled up if you've been working in it for a few hours.

If the above ideas don't help:

4. Which pdf printer are you using? If the problem happens again, you might try a different pdf printer and see if that makes a difference.

5. It's possible that your pdf printer is out of date or corrupted. You might try reinstalling the pdf printer you're using. 

5. In your print setup dialog, are you using vector or raster graphics? Try using vector if the current setting is raster.

Let me know how it goes!

Cheers,

Judy Staicer

[Judy_S]

Hi, again,

There's one more thing to look at: are your views using non-rectangular crop regions? There was an issue with non-rectangular crop regions which caused some elements to fail to print. The issue has been corrected in Revit 2017.1.1, so if you don't have this build installed, updating your software may correct the problem. Here's a link to the article about this issue: Revit: Non- rectangular crop region causes model geometry to disappear

Best,

Judy Staicer

[Darin_HDR]

Thanks Judy for looking into this for me.

First it looks like my Revit build is 17.0.416.0. Not sure why my Autodesk Download Manager isn't working any more, but I guess that is another issue. Regardless, the views with the disappearing wall tag (and it has happened on multiple views) have rectangular crop zones (nothing funny).

To print to pdf, I am using Bluebeam Revu x64 Standard version 2015.6 print driver. Since vector printing is the default and I have never really learned the difference, I always use that, rather than switching to raster.

If I see this glitch pop up again, I will try your other recommendations and let you know.

Thanks again,

Darin

[Darin_HDR]

No solution but some additional information. I have found that this glitch spans more than one project file and it is showing up on a different project. Didn't experience the glitch first hand as I have again only become aware of it at a pre-bid walk through when all the contractors started asking me how each wall was to be constructed. My response, "You just have to check the wall taaaa....oh." Interestingly enough, my engineer commented that they have been seeing similar issues with keynote tags that mysteriously don't show up when they print.

Another interesting observation, the wall tags were completely gone from two different plan views, but on a wall type view (which is just a floor plan view at a larger scale with detail elements over the walls, all the wall tags showed up except for one. All of these three views are on the same sheet. Again, checked the file and all the tags are visible. Printed to pdf again and everything shows up on the new print (FYI, I did do an audit when I opened it, so I guess it is possible that fixed the problem). Very odd behavior.

[Darin_HDR]

Brand new file and same issue. In this one I noticed the wall tags were not on a view. I clicked the "Reveal Hidden Elements" button to see if they accidentally got turned off. They showed up but not as hidden elements (they were greyed out, not red like hidden objects are). When I turned off "Reveal Hidden Elements" they showed back up. This is extremely frustrating that it has now become a constant that I have to check before printing.  

Hey it's March though right. I can hope in the next release the glitches will be fixed (yeah right).

[PaulusPresent_BB]

Dear

In the past, once or twice I too ran into the problem of certain Revit elements not appearing in the PDF print, although clearly visible in the Revit view.

The solution for me was always to switch from vector printing (which is the standard way to go, as this delivers indefinitly zoomable PDFs) to raster printing.

A vector printed PDF contains vectorial data with a thickness added to each vector. No matter how far you zoom in, the PDF lines will stay crisp. Moreover when you import a vector printed PDF in AutoCAD, you will be able to snap to the lines and their endpoints, because they are described as vectors in the PDF.

In contrast a raster printed PDF is printed according to a printer resolution (aka the raster). For some graphical views (containing shading,etc... more info here: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/revit-products/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2016/EN...) Revit automatically switches to raster printing. As you zoom into a raster printed PDF you will start to see the resolution of the PDF, the same way if you would zoom into a JPG. You will not be able to snap to the lines in AutoCAD when imported as the PDF is just an 'image' of the view and does not contain any data about the original lines themselves.

Raster printed PDFs tend to be bigger in size then Vector printed PDFs the same way a vector image is smaller then a regular image

I have the experience that raster printing does not 'forget' objects when printing as sometimes happens with vector printing in my experience.

I print using PDFcreator.

Kind regards

Paulus

[DYLAN]

I and a coworker are experience this exact issue as well. We have run the Revit 2017 file on Audit, have emptied temp folder, have printed from Adobe PDF and Blubeam PDF, and still the PDF randomly has wall tags missing from some views (and sometimes the reappear in one view and disappear in another... it's not consistent).  So far it seems if we just print one sheet at a time the tags don't disappear. So we are currently trying to patch together our Bid Set printing one sheet at a time. Extremely tedious. Please help!

[ToanDN]

Export Sheets to DWFx and print the DWFs to PDF.

[Darin_HDR]

Printing to DWFx is not a solution. Like I mentioned in my previous post, I have noticed this tag disappearing in the file itself, exclusive of printing. Since I don't print in-house, all my prints are to PDF and is where I first noticed the issue. However, since the tag is disappearing in the file (again randomly) I have to assume it would be the same if I export to DWFx, print to a plotter or print to a PDF.

@DYLAN, do you know if you have seen the tags disappear prior to printing to PDF? Have you checked a sheet, seen the tags, printed and they are not there? Or have you just noticed that they are missing after you have printed (not knowing for sure if they were visible prior to printing)?

My assumption is that for me, that the tags were always not visible in the file prior to printing, and that I only noticed them missing after creating the PDF. As previously mentioned, the tags become visible again for whatever reason at random (probably closing and reopening the file) or turning on and off reveal hidden elements, also brought them back.

[DYLAN]

I have exported to DWFx and experience the same issue... some wall tags are randomly disappearing.

The wall tags do not disappear within Revit sheet view. They are always there. It's only upon printing to PDF (or DWFx) that some of them randomly disappear. Generally they disappear completely from a given sheet, but fully appear in other sheets. If printed again, the sheets that tags appear or disappear in often changes.

For now I am basically having to reprint the sheets with missing tags until I get them to appear and then manually collate the correct sheets.

This is a pretty serious glitch. Is Autodesk working on a solution?

[Darin_HDR]

I have to say, my issue sounds a bit different than DYLAN's in that I believe I can check to see if the wall tags appear or not since I think they are either showing up or not showing up in sheet view prior to printing. Regardless I do agree that this is a pretty serious glitch that needs correcting. I will echo DYLAN in questioning if Autodesk gives two shakes about this issue or if they are just hoping things turn out better with 2018 (which I am presently doubtful of).