Allow Annotations to Be Anchored to the Crop Region

[david7K7DR]

Revit should allow view annotations, particularly North Arrows, to be anchored to a corner of the Crop Region with a user-defined offset.

For example, a North Arrow could be set to remain 1/4" from the upper-right corner of the crop region. If the crop region is resized, moved, or its extents change, the North Arrow would automatically maintain its position relative to that corner.

Ideally, this could be controlled through View Templates so that plan views automatically receive consistently positioned North Arrows without requiring manual placement and adjustment on every view.

This could also be useful for other view-based annotations that need a consistent location relative to the drawing extents.

Suggested functionality:

• Anchor annotation to Top Left, Top Right, Bottom Left, or Bottom Right of Crop Region

• Adjustable X/Y offset

• Annotation automatically follows changes to Crop Region

• Compatible with View Templates

• Works with North Arrows, Generic Annotations, and similar view annotations

This would significantly improve drawing consistency and reduce repetitive annotation work across large drawing sets. This would also provide an important visual orientation check. Plans are not always oriented with North toward the top of the sheet, and an automatically anchored North Arrow would make the actual orientation immediately apparent regardless of how the view is cropped or positioned. Because the annotation remains associated with the view rather than being manually positioned on the sheet, it would also reduce the risk of a North Arrow being omitted, misplaced, or becoming inconsistent when views are reorganized.

[david7K7DR]

Another useful application would be View Titles. A View Title could be anchored to the bottom-left of the crop region with a defined offset, so resizing the crop automatically repositions the title.

Ideally, Revit could provide anchor points around the crop region (corners, centers, etc.) and allow different annotations to be assigned to them. North Arrows, View Titles, Graphic Scales, Key Plans, and Generic Annotations could then maintain consistent positions as view extents change.

If these anchoring rules could also be defined through View Templates, it would eliminate a lot of repetitive sheet cleanup and improve consistency across an entire drawing set.

[david7K7DR]

Another extension of this would be the ability to align related views across multiple sheets. For example, Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, RCPs, demolition plans, etc. could share a common viewport/crop alignment so that the building remains in exactly the same position when flipping between sheets.

Combined with crop-region annotation anchoring, this would allow the plan, View Title, North Arrow, Graphic Scale, and other annotations to maintain consistent positions throughout an entire drawing set.

Ideally, Revit could allow views to be assigned to an alignment group, with the option to lock their viewport position and/or crop extents across sheets.

[RLY_15]

Crop boxes may be a bit too customizable for this to be advantageous - between non-rectangular crop boxes, section breaks in crop boxes, etc. there's a lot of behavior to capture. Annotation elements like element tags and spot tags have physical coordinates - you can pull the X,Y,Z values for them. I don't believe Crop regions share the same coordinate system, so anchoring one to the other may be sketchy to implement.

On the other hand, section boxes and scope boxes are simplified cubes, in XYZ space, with pretty well-defined geometry. So establishing constraints against those elements does sound pretty nice.

I would think the general correlations for set anchors could be:

• View Titles<->Crop Regions - both have coordinate systems intended for 'paper' space versus the project's model space.
• View Tags/Spot Tags/Generic Annotations <->Section/Scope Box

As to the last comment about view alignment between sheets, I believe that's already a thing in later versions of Revit, unless there is a specific behavior you're expecting to see that it isn't providing.

[david7K7DR]

Good point regarding non-rectangular crop regions. I don't think the anchor necessarily needs to reference the actual crop boundary geometry. It could reference the crop region's overall rectangular bounding box/extents instead. That would provide predictable Top Left, Top Right, Bottom Left and Bottom Right anchor locations regardless of jogs or split crops.

The intent is really to establish a relationship between the view extents and paper-space annotations, rather than physically constrain an annotation to a crop-line segment. For example: “keep this North Arrow 1/4" inside the upper-right extent of this view” or “keep this View Title 1/4" below the lower-left extent.”

I agree that a more general element-to-element relationship system could be even more powerful. Crop Region ↔ View Title/North Arrow is just one immediately useful application.

[david7K7DR]

Currently, the only way I've found to achieve truly consistent placement is to duplicate the previous sheet with views, place the new view directly over the duplicated view, align View Title, and then delete the duplicated view. It works very well, but essentially uses the previous viewport as a temporary alignment template. It would be great if Revit could preserve this relationship directly through viewport/crop-region alignment or alignment groups.