Revit's Text Editor Needs To Be At Least As Good As AutoCAD's

[scbunker]

I know that the text editor in Revit is the subject of much derision and update requests. And I know that it was improved a few years ago. But it's just not enough. So I have a different take on it - just make it at least as good as AutoCAD.

In AutoCAD, you can control paragraph spacing, have multi-level lists (outlines), tab stops (multiple tab stops and different kinds of tab stops), control indents, control columns, etc. etc. 

We need text editing features this robust within Revit.

I've heard it said before that Revit is a modeling software and not a text editing software, but I don't consider this argument to be valid. Modeling is useless unless we can adequately document it, and documentation includes detailed notes. That's like saying that AutoCAD is a drafting software and not a text editing software.

[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.

[JADAstudio]

Additionally it would be very useful to be able to control the line spacing (leading) between items in structured lists. Currently larger bulleted or enumerated lists with multiple lines of text per list item visually run together without any graphic cues other than the bullet or number about where one item ends and the next begins. We address this by inserting a soft return (shift-enter) after each list item but this takes unnecessary time. It would be better if we could define a "space after" distance that applied to the entire text block or text style itself.

[MichaelWolff]

How about adding parameter support for text notes (eg. %Parameter%). Perhaps regular expressions would also be a useful addition.

[Anonymous]

As a AutoCAD and AutoCAD Architecture user for the past 16 years I will have to strongly agree. The multi-line text editor is the one thing I really miss using.

Revit’s annotation has improved since Vr 16 but your right for the cash we pay out its time they overhauled it to be as flexible as vanilla AutoCAD.

[Anonymous]

Couldn't agree more. There's nothing more annoying than wanting to edit text, type and nothing shows until I actually click with the mouse inside the text box!!!! since Revit 2017 that this has been happening and I've been using Revit 2019 since November. Autodesk needs to fix this.

[mshoai]

I see there are lots of ideas on how to improve text editors in revit. what I like to add to the growing list is to have a menu to give us the options of adding the most commonly used  characters right off the menu(like AutoCAD) , so we don't have to keep using windows keys to insert a character,

Thanks

Matt

[RobLEDC]

Also text/tags in Revit should be able to snap to references lines and to objects (i.e. if I have a circle with a label for tag why can't the label be set to middle justify and snap to the middle of the circle?) Also even though I use tags and custom tags as much as possible the functionality to have leader text snap and align to tags would be helpful for creating professional looking documents. 

[zhaohui.chen5TEA7]

And it is better to have fields which can link to sheet/view references, parameters, etc, in text.

[ipselute]

Absolutely YES!! It is utterly ridiculous how Autodesk claims Revit is so much more advanced than Autocad, yet they can't fix such simple issue like rich text formatting.

P.S. If i recall correctly, Autocad text editing got so much better after a Microsoft-Autodesk deal (more than 10 years ago): Microsoft got some Autodesk technology for 3D objects in MS Office, and Autodesk got some advanced text editing and some excel-like tables technology from Microsoft.

I just don't understand why (advanced) text editing features is not a standard package across all Autodesk products. Every other Autodesk software seems to be having different text editing capabilities. Just maintaining so many different packages seems an unnecessary burden.

[Anonymous]

Unbelievable that text editing has been so clumsy for so long.  After using revit for more than a dozen years and you can't even do very basic edits like make two notes go bold or centered simultaneously, you have to edit them one by one.

There was software back in the 90's that did this, but Autodesk claims they are good value and are happy with the "advancements". 🙄

[pieterdewaal]

My main issue is not being able to adjust landing length with a parameter... It is difficult to maintain a neat standard.

I suggest they add an editable parameter to all text notes that allows to adjust the leader landing, perhaps via the text type, with an additional checkbox for variable/fixed.

[CarlaG]

I would love text to have an angle parameter too

[hemel116]

I was also thinking the same. It would be great if I could type symbols directly into the text. using the character map is tiresome.

[eblackburnEFFVJ]

Bulleted lists are poor. You can't split text blocks into new columns like you can in a Schedule and maintain the numbering. I would love the ability to assign a view reference link within a block of text in the same way that Revolution Design's workFlow has an autoLink tool that accomplishes this. So if I have "See Detail A/A101" within a text block, the A/A101 portion of the text would be a live link to that view. If the view changes to another detail number or sheet, the text updates automatically.

[steiner]

By the same occassion fixin the text bug in family templates (you cannot erase the text object in familiy templates but you have to erase the text in the object) would be great.

[KrisAribal]

or if that's hard for Autodesk they can let us link a word document to Revit. I don't care if it's an image or a raster image just let us link word document to Revit. 

I think the main problem with Revit's atrocious text editor is they're improving what's on the base Revit when Autodesk purchase Revit. AutoCAD is Autodesk's original software, Revit is not. They just purchase it. So rather to reinvent Revit they just keep piling on features in it. 

[DP-Mike]

Another issue with Revit Text Editor is the way it backs you out of the editor if you press CTRL+Left Arrow. 
Anyone who has done editing in any other document editor knows you can move the cursor to the beginning of the word to the right or left by using CTRL + an arrow direction. If you hold shift at the same time you highlight. But if you don't hold shift, and try and go to the previous word, you are out of the editor and have to go back to the mouse to double click in. 

It is really sad that AutoDesk charges so much for Revit, but gives us a text editor that is worse than WordPerfect circa 1975. It's so bad I've had firms print their notes to PDF and insert them as an image into Revit.