Revit Text Box Contents: Removing Line Breaks from the text Parameter

[Anonymous]

I have a text box associated with a eneric Model element. The text box requires me to use Line Breaks to manage the shape of the text box because (as far as I know) I can't set the width of the text box and let Revit manage the line-breaking...

Because I'm manually entering line breaks, the parameter content (short- to medium-length text) is broken up, and when I export (using BIMlink, but I imagine it's a common problem regardless) the text has line breaks in it.

I am posting on here to find out if there's a better way to do the text boxes so that we don't have to manually input line breaks; or alternatively there's a solution to remove the line breaks from the parameter that doesn't involve post-processing the text in Excel. The reason is that the lead consultant will be extracting that text from our model, into a schedule, so they won't be post-processing it. Most other consultants aren't facing the same problem because they're not displaying this text on the drawings; only a reference number to the schedule. It is our preference to include a text description tied to a symbol.

Thanks

[Redrunner92]

Are you making these text boxes directly in the project file or within a family file, such as a tag family? Either way, the blue dots at the left-hand and right-hand sides of the text field will constrain the width of the text box if you move them at all after you first create the text box. Line breaks will occur in the text box within the constrained width. If you're creating a tag, then you'll need to do some planning to know how wide you want the text box to be on the sheet, not how wide within a view because such text boxes don't adapt to a drawing's scale. Within that tag family, you can use lines to draw a box the desired size, then create a label inside that box with the parameter of your choice, then use the blue circles on the right and left sides of the text box to stretch it to the sides of the box you made with lines. (Also align the text to Left, Center or Right, as you deem best.) Then you can delete the lines, keep them, add a visibility parameter, whatever you want to do with them; regardless of the lines, the text box will remain as wide as you created it, and line breaks will occur automatically inside it.

[barthbradley]

Multiline Text

https://blogs.rand.com/architectural/2015/05/revit-2016-new-hidden-gem-2-multiline-text-type-paramet...

[Anonymous]

Thanks for this insight.

I've dug into this a bit more. a highlighted element is shown below; I edited the text to replace some project-specifc words with just underscores, for privacy. In the top image (above the black line) you can clearly see where there are some line breaks. In the lower image, you can see the text is all one single line. Indeed, where the line breaks are in the text, I have to backspace twice to remove the invisible linebreak character. These linebreak characters are causing the problem when the text is exported to Excel. But I think it's done to force the text box width smaller, because (As seen in the top image) there are no handles to change the box size).

I believe this is a custom tag family -- put together as a standard element in our company. It's a company-specific Annotation-Tag for Generic Models (the associated symbols are Generic Model elements).

[Anonymous]

Hiya, sorry I only responded on the weekend. Could you share any follow-up thoughts to my response on Saturday?

Thanks

[Redrunner92]

No worries, it's your question so it's on your timeline 🙂 I'm going to side with @barthbradley and say I advise you to try creating a parameter of the type "Multiline Text" and put that in your tag family. The text entry window looks different for these types of parameters: instead of a single line, you get a pop-up window which is meant for longer text passages. The two types of text parameters control line breaks differently. A single-line text parameter only controls line breaks via the size of the text box built into the family (be it a tag, generic annotation or something else). In contrast, a multiline text parameter controls line breaks both by the size of the text box in the family and by the breaks manually entered into the field in the project environment (the pop-up window in the image below). See in the multiline text: I manually entered line breaks after the words "to" and "and", so different lines started; I did not enter a line break after the word "will" yet a line break occurred due to the size of the text box I made in the family.

So give multiline text a go and see if that gives you what you want.

A single-line text parameter is above the green line, and a multiline text parameter is below the green line.