Idea, Pipe Flow Direction

[jessem5CN9L]

Hi all! My engineers on their projects will manually add text and flow arrows overtop their plumbing lines (example below) in an effort to make things clearer once it's printed in black and white. I realize this might be a bit more of an AutoCAD mentality, but I'm wondering if there's a way we could make these labels and arrows part of the piping system itself?

Ideas on how I could go about this? I'm hoping to save them some time on redundant activity.

[iainsavage]

The lettering can easily (and indeed should) be a tag rather than text. Create a pipe tag which reads the system abbreviation. Apply it without a leader. The tag will automatically populate its text depending on which pipe system it is placed on.

The arrows can also be a pipe tag with special characters (wingding font) to represent the arrows but you need to manually orientate the arrow, it won't automatically read the flow direction from the pipe. Usually you would have two types in the family, one for right & up, the other for left & down.

Try to limit the use of dumb text as much as possible.

[HVAC-Novice]

this is a really great question, and idea by iainsavage. Please share if you come up with a family or similar. 

[iainsavage]

I'll donate these families for you to try.

[cesar67P3S]

Amazing!! Thanks a lot! 

[HVAC-Novice]

Thanks so much! It took me a while to incorporate your tags. I added the arrow and abbreviation feature into my standard pipe tag. This forced me to re-engineer how you did it. 

Re-creating the system abbreviation was straightforward. But the arrows made me learn about Wingdings. 

In your family you used Wingdings. but for some reason that didn't work for me and I had to use Wingdings 3. And if you are like me and don't know how to use that, here is what I found out:

- in the family create text and change the font to Wingdings 3

- set background to transparent

- in Windows, enter "charmap" into search. that brings you the below character map

- select the symbol you want and copy it into your family text box (from step above). Make sure you use the exact same font (Wingdings 3" in my case)

I now will create the same thing for duct tags and suspect the process is the same. 

As for the abbreviations: You obviously need enter the abbreviation and description into the pipe system types. i then created a schedule that shows abbreviation and description. but maybe this isn't necessary if I enter than in my normal HVAC abbreviations table. 

[russellvee]

I love making wacky revit workarounds to try to recreate CAD standards for the old heads, so I gave this one a shot:

I nested generic annotations with an arrow shaped filled region and a text label into a the built-in pipe coupling fitting. I made the arrow length and angle adjustable with parameters. Wacky!