Upgrading Revit versions - Text size change

[Anonymous]

We are looking to upgrade many Revit projects. The text size difference between 2016 and 2017 makes it extremely tedious for us to upgrade many older projects since the text is overflowing all over the place.

I was wondering if anyone has successfully automated the process of converting the Revit files and keeping the text as is, meaning there is no manual work or resizing text anywhere?

You can read more about the problem here:

https://ideatesoftware.com/blog/revit-2017-text-size-changes

I am ideally looking for a solution that has already been tested successfully on one or multiple projects.

[Sahay_R]

Please take a look at these links for more information -

Text in PDFs printed from Revit 2017 is very large
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/revit-products/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles...

Revit - Text stretched when printing to PDF
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/revit-products/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles...

Revit 2017 - Cannot print text properly
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/revit-products/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles...

It may also be an issue with Adobe Acrobat or reader settings -

To fix the display issues in Adobe Acrobat or Reader, use the following procedure:
Within Adobe Acrobat or Reader, select the Edit menu and then click Preferences.
Select "Page Display" on the left.
Uncheck "Smooth line art." Depending on your version of Acrobat/Reader, you may need to first disable "2D Graphics Acceleration."

Alternately, switching over to a TrueType (TTF) font can improve the PDF output. This issue occurs more with text objects that use an SHX font.

[Matt__W]

@sarsenaultTW5WM You can cheat by adjusting the text height by a fraction of an inch.

[Anonymous]

Hi Sahay,

You are talking about another problem. The difference between the Revit text and the printed text.

I am talking about the upgrade between Revit 2016 to 2016 changing the text size. Therefore, the articles you pointed to are unrelated.

You can read about it a bit more here, but this post does not offer a solution.

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/revit-products/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2017/EN...

[Anonymous]

Hi @Matt__W, thanks for the tip.

Based of the article I posted in the first post, I was thinking of modifying the size of all text, maybe using Dynamo. I was just looking to see if someone had done something similar in a real project

Here is the key information:

From empirical measurements I’ve found Arial about 2% larger and Calibri about 18% larger in text upgraded to Revit 2017. Other fonts will vary depending on the height of ‘h’ versus ‘M.’ 

So I was going to scale all my text styles down to go back to 100% equivalency, hopefully using Dynamo.

Our senior BIM guy says that simply scaling the text is not enough, a lot of manual work is required. I was hoping to find an alternative solution that requires no manual work and has been tested successfully before.

[Matt__W · Accepted solution]

I don't think there's a "silver bullet" for this issue, unfortunately. You WILL have to check each and every sheet, view, detail, elevation, etc. to make sure the text, tags, etc. is correct.