General notes (how to work with paragraphs) in Revit

[JML_Mela]

Hello all!

We are finishing the pass from Cad to Revit. 

We usually have several pages of notes when we work with A3. These are general contractual notes or how to install stuff, description of the water features... 

Is there an efficient way to work with paragraphs in revit 2018? I could not find something to separate the text in colums appart form copying the text and erasing, which is not easy and brings problems.

Thanks you! 

[jmhanbyV4TDM]

[RSomppi]

Revit's text editor is not as robust as AutoCAD's by any stretch of the imagination.

Since the tools are limited, some manual manipulation is required. Pages of notes in Revit is going to be a chore. You might be better off using another program, maybe AutoCAD, that has the tools you need and linking it into Revit.

[barthbradley]

Why don't you just copy and paste from a Word Processor or AutoCAD? Bada bing! 

[RLY_15]

Text notes don't currently support column structures (if I had to guess you likely have 4-5 columns of content per drawing sheet?)

You can simulate the look of a column structure by spacing text notes, but it may just be easier in the long run to try and contain specification sections/general notes to singular columns so that you aren't trying to push notes across multiple text objects. If it's a particularly lengthy section see if you can find a natural break at a subsection header and split it there... hopefully these are sections where you are primarily deleting excessive notes and not adding new notes per project.

[ToanDN · Accepted solution]

You can use a key schedule or a note block schedule for general notes then you can break it into multiple columns.

[Corsten.Au]

Its a one time task. There's no shortcut cause you are customising to your required sheet size ( A3, A2 )

with different Text size, font, format..

There's no provision to move / change text to columns in Revit.

Define the Column width.. ( Standard )

I create multiple Annotation based families for various text and notes which needs to stay steady

and it helps avoiding any unintended changes which is a possibility is general Text.

Annotation based family also help to rearrange locations on sheets easily and copy in multiple places if required keeping the context / content consistent. 

Cheers.

[JML_Mela]

Hi!

These are the kind of notes that we have in certain projects. Is like having the specs inserted in the drawings. This particulary example was an A3 format. 

We can't just have always the same as all the projects are different and it is not as working in architecture or MEP.

[JML_Mela]

The screen shot went to the message 8...

[JML_Mela]

Ouff, we were just trying to finally JUMP into revit...

[JML_Mela]

We do copy the notes from word, the problem is the layout, the line spacing.... it looked terrible....

[JML_Mela]

Thanks, I was Trying to avoid it.

[RSomppi]

I can't read what is on those sheets but it looks like an excessive amount of text for sheets. BR I used to specs on sheets sometimes but they were never that many sheets. We would use 8 1/2x11 if there were that many. I wouldn't try to do that in Revit. It's a huge waste of time.

[JML_Mela]

I know but for some projects (it doesn't depend on me, we include the specs inside the drawings...)

Thanks anyway

[RSomppi]

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@JML_Mela wrote:

(it doesn't depend on me, we include the specs inside the drawings...)

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In my early days as a drafter, everyone hated doing spec on sheets so it trickled down to me to do the formatting. Keep in mind, this was before columns were available in AutoCAD. When I explained how long it took to just generate them and the any edits took quite a ling time too. Even copy/paste from Word took so much proof reading that it was not worth the time compared to doing a booklet spec. When the higher ups see money being wasted, they usually find a way to minimize wasted time.

[Lachlan-JWP]

Why not set up a series on templates in Microsoft Word that include your titleblock? That will give you as many formatting options as you could possibly want. You can also spell check in Word which you can't do for note blocks or schedules in Revit.

If you want them to appear in Revit then have a template without the title block but set margins to resemble your Revit titleblock, print that spec to PDF and insert onto a Revit sheet.