A REVOLUTIONARY IDEA THAT WOULD CHANGE THE WORLD

[lee.imbimbo]

So I'm probably not the first to ask for this, but I have a novel idea.  One that people might even call revolutionary for the Revit Software.  MAN OH MAN, if they could incorporate this, it would set them ahead as a super advanced industry leader.  The technology I speak of, my friends, is so revolutionary that man just to think of it's power would provide chills down one's spine.  Now before I mention it, I want you to close your eyes (no wait you're reading this), OPEN THEM!

Now I want you to imagine a world where a software that claims to be advanced (as Revit does), included (WAIT FOR IT)

BASIC WORD PROCESSING CAPABILITIES!

Just imagine using tabs, and multiple fonts within a single text box, gasp behold the line spacing.

Now once they master this, imagine they incorporated wait for it TABLES, KERNING, TRACKING.

Oh man, I tell you, if they mastered this revolutionary 1980's technology AutoDESK would lay a groundwork that would smash the design world wide open.  But the real question is, DO THEY HAVE THE GUTS to persevere and provide this technology to their clients.  Or are they too lily-livered to even try.

[dplumb_BWBR]

Thanks for your revolutionary idea.

If you had done a search for "Text Editor",  you wouldn't have found a dozen other posts about it.

[lee.imbimbo]

dplumb, yep it offers the most basic of auto-numbering and basic text editing.  That is not what I'm proposing.  I know it's revolutionary, and definitely out of the box thinking.  But anyone that has ever used these crazy things call tabs in a word processor can attest to their power.

I'm just saying, it would be revolutionary to bring 1980's technology into the software.  I mean it only took AutoDesk until release 2008 to finally add some of this functionality to the multi-line text in AutoCAD.  So that was let's say the 22th iteration of the software.  I know it is advanced thinking, and truly revolutionary.  Let's see if they can offer it.

To be fair their iteration of the multi-line text would make Word Perfect look advanced in comparison.  Call out to my people that remember Word Perfect.

[pieter1]

Perhaps consider coming of that high horse of yours 😉

No seriously, it's totally understandable that you might need extra text editor features, but like you yourself mentioned in your post, specific ideas about what needs to be added to the text editor have been posted a dozen times. So I think what dplumb is getting to is that it would pay off to do a search on this forum and vote up the specific ideas that you want to see implemented.

You'd be amazed on how much time this all costs to implement. The developers are not likely to react on a broad idea like 'better text', but specific ideas like 'make the border instance based' or 'add columns capability' or even 'add inline table functionality in text editor' are ideas that can be acted upon.

[lee.imbimbo]

Pieter as a fellow designer, I'm by no means blind to the idea of how much time it takes to implement a new idea into a system.  In fact, it is the chief complaint of all design professionals that people do not account for the amount of time it takes to actually develop something.  None of my comments had anything to do with the time aspect.  Rather that sometimes the simplest of things can get overlooked when taking into account higher end product delivery.  But the truth is that simplicity in implementation and user interface is probably the most important aspect to a software, and probably some of the harder to develop.

For example, Revit's Schedule formatting system is clunky at best, and extremely limited.  Thus the schedules it produces while powerful leave much to be desired when it comes to graphic representation.  Which may seem trivial but the truth is user interface is probably the most important aspect of any well presented system, whether it be on the computer or on paper.

The word editing tools would be much more powerful if they just allowed for basic editing and font control that has existed since the 1980s.  So you can attack all you want.  But all I hear is this: "yeah it's a good idea, but I'm too stressed out by other good ideas, so I don't want to deal with it."  You think it is trivial so you treat it as such.  When graphical representation, user interface, and client interaction is literally the reason my clients come back to me over and over again.

So sure I could go vote up other ideas.  Or Autodesk could just as easily do a query for the many inquiries there are asking for better user interface when it comes to word processing and scheduling.  And probably see that many people are requesting it.  I don't need to do their work for them, I pay them a lot of money for the software, that's their job not mine.  For a piece of software that I have spent close to $250,000 implementing in my office you bet I'm going to be critical.  I'm paying Autodesk a lot of money for it, it better be worth it.

[dplumb_BWBR]

But you still haven't provided a single example of WHAT you need a better "Word Processor" for.

"Make my drawing pretty" isn't exactly a concrete benchmark for a programmer to start writing code for.

What is it that you're putting in your Revit models that CAN'T accomplish with the existing tools?

We have very limited elements in our models that are pure Text.

About a dozen General Notes and a few Legends that are really nothing more than Lists. And the Text improvements in 2017 & 2108 pretty much took care of those.

So what is it that you NEED all of the capabilities of Word to do? 

Are you doing your Specifications in Revit?

Sure, it would be nice to have a nicer UI ti enter and edit Text.

And I agree with you about Schedules, (but that wasn't in your initial post.)

However, we do a pretty good job of leveraging the information in our models using Tags and Schedules. There's not a whole lot of pure Text on our Sheets.

There are a lot of things I'd prefer they spend time ($) implementing rather than Text.

Date parameter and Rotate Drafting Patterns are my top priorities and I have Ideas posted about both.