Show History and Backups behavior

Someone asked me a question if the File menu > show history command could be restricted to show only certain parts of the saved history of the RVT project. Typically a Revit project keeps the history of all the saves along with the comments (if any). Here is chart that shows the RVT behavior in various scenarios.

File type	Show History	Backups
Central File	All STC info since its beginning	No of backups based on the number entered while doing the first save as. (default 20)
Local File	All STC and local save info since its beginning	ditto
“detach from central” option while opening a file	copies history from original file	all backups lost from original
“save as”	Retains only STC history info.	all backups lost from original
“save as” with “Make this a central file after save” option	Loses all history	all backups lost from original

Print PDF to exactly 50% scale

May be there are easier ways to print PDF files to exact 50% scale. Adobe Reader does not have this print to scale feature. We tried using the scaling feature built in with the printer. But this resulted in non standard size sheets, which we didn't want.

We found a very easier method. Just open the PDF using Autodesk Design Review 2010 (free software) and this software has amazing capability to print to any size / scale. Just wonderful!

1. Go to File menu > Open Autodesk Design Review 2010. By default it shows only dwf /dwfx files. But you can select other file types (including PDF) from the ‘Files of Type’ drop down.
   
2. The print window has far better options than Adobe Reader / Acrobat.  
   

Switch on and off elements and invisible text

In one of our projects we had some ‘owner furnished contractor installed’ (OFCI) equipments. We didn't want to show these elements in our contract drawings, but also wanted the ability to show them for client meetings, etc. The building is more than 10 floors, and there were 100s of such equipments strewn around.

The best way to achieve this would be to create a separate workset for these equipments, and when you switch off the workset (File menu > Worksets) these elements, along with their tags, get turned off.

The problem is our project was not setup this way. Even though we placed all the objects in a new workset, the tags didn't get turned off, because they were not really tags but dumb texts!!  Text objects belong to the view workset and so, could not be placed in the newly created workset.

So, we were looking for a workaround. One solution was to create a new text style with almost white color (254, 254, 254) and no leader.

We assigned all the texts related to these OFCI equipment to this text style to switch them off!  We have to just redefine the text style to make them visible again.

It still would have been better if we were aware of this requirement while setting up the project!

Instance grips stop working

When you are working on a big project, once in a while, Revit gets tired off doing all the calculations, all the coordination and shows its anger on simple families that have instance parameter grips.

For eg., here is a very simple extrusion family with an instance grip.

Pulling the grip after working on the project for some time would not change the geometry of the family. If you go to the properties of the family and change it’s instance value, it works fine.

But still, one cannot pull the grips to modify.

However, if you use the align

command to extend (change) the geometry, the grips become alive again!

I don't know why this happens.

Vista file deletion problem

I had written about a vista file deletion problem some time back. Vista would not allow a certain file to be renamed / deleted / moved. This happened to mostly DWG and RVT files that are more than 3 years old.

The happy news is that if you installed the web update 1 for the Revit 2010 versions, this problem should go away. If you still have this problem, please file a support request with Autodesk.