Change Electrical Symbol Size

[Anonymous]

Is there anyway to scale the symbol sizes for an electrical fixture.  Whatever my scale is for my viewport in my sheet, the electrical symbols stay the same.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[scbunker]

Symbols are supposed to stay the same size on the sheet. There is no way to make them do otherwise. When you draw the symbol in the family, you draw them at 1:1 scale, and Revit scales them according to the view scale.

I know of two ways to work around this. 

1.) draw the symbol in the device family using model lines. The downsides to this is that the model lines will always be visible in 3d and if you draw them on top of the device, they won't be visible when viewed from below in hidden line and vice versa. You'd have to draw the symbol twice, once on top and once on bottom. Or you could override the device type to be transparent in the view.

2.) Scale the symbol. You can create a new Scale Factor instance parameter to divide (or multiply) your constraints in your symbol family. Unfortunately, there is no way to read the current drawing scale, so you'll have to set this parameter for each device you place..

[Anonymous]

How do I create the new scale factor instance in the family?

[scbunker]

Attach the family and I can take a look.

[Anonymous]

See attached

[scbunker]

I had to upgrade it to 2017 because that's what I have on my machine.

I didn't do the whole symbol. It's a bit of work. But I created a new line in the symbol that is associated with a scale factor instance parameter. So if you want the symbol to appear at a different scale than the actual drawing scale, you can type the current drawing scale factor in as an instance parameter and that line I created will scale appropriately. You'll have to set a base scale factor (the scale at which the symbol is the proper size). Right now I have it set at 1/8" scale (factor 96).

Do do the rest of the symbol, you'll need to edit the symbol family to be sure all the geometry is connected to a parameter and each parameter should be calculated as I have done the new line I created. Hopefully what I've done will give you an idea of what you need to do.

You won't be able to scale the line thickness. That's not possible (as far as I know).

This is a family from CTC. They have excellent products, but they're pretty complicated. It took me a long time before I started to understand what was going on in some of their families. It will be a lot of work to edit all their families to do this. If I may ask: why don't you want the symbol to scale with the drawing? Symbols are typically annotative, even in AutoCAD.

[Anonymous]

I have my scale at 1/2"=1' currently, as that is what the floorplan fits on our desired 24"x36" sheet.  We want to keep that sheet scale, it's just that the symbols come up small.  Changing the sheet scale will make the symbols larger, but the floorplan runs off the sheet

[scbunker]

If this is just a one-off thing, it's probably easier to just make the symbol larger and Save-As the family under a different name. Rather than making it parametric to work at any drawing scale. You can just window all the lines in the symbol family and scale them from the origin. I don't know that you can scale the hatches. Probably you'll have to edit each hatch boundary and scale the sketch. The hatches in that family are all connected to visibility parameters so if you recreate them, be sure to attach them back to the visibility parameters. If this is just a one-off thing and you don't need the hatches, you can just delete them.

[MuirEng]

Hey Derek,

Can I ask why you want the symbols to come out scaled up? The idea behind annotative symbols is that they will be legible at all scales, and if the symbol is easy to read then why make it bigger? We issue electrical plans typically at 3/16"=1' but sometimes 1/4"=1' typically.

Have you tried generating your plan using either of those scales, and if so what is the issue, other than only using half of your sheet? I might not understand your core need here, just asking in case I can help you avoid spending time solving a problem you don't need to.

added... I just re-read your post where you explain your scale and comment that if you alter the scale so the symbols are larger then the view runs off the page. This doesn't make sense to me. If you switch to a 1/4'=1' then your view will be half sized, not double. The annotative symbols will be the same size on paper but you could say that they get bigger in a sense (if you compared to walls and doors and such. 

If they are stock (or sized like stock ) symbols and you are printing at 100% size they should come out just right.

Hope this helps...