From the course: Revit 2024: Essential Training for Architecture

Adding text - Revit Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2024: Essential Training for Architecture

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Adding text

“

- [Instructor] In this video, we're going to look at the text tool almost any architectural drawing has some text on there. And the simplest way to add text is to use the text tool. Now mostly the text tool is pretty self-explanatory but let me just walk you through some of the higher level features. So the text tool is right here on the quick access toolbar, or you could also find it on the annotate tab. And the keyboard shortcut is T + X. Now I'm going to start with the first option here which is Text Without a Leader. There are a few different options here. We'll do the ones with the leader in just a few moments. But all you need to do is just click on screen somewhere where you want to place the text and then start typing. Now I'm working in an elevation view here but you can add text to any kind of Revit view. To get out of the text command, you want to click next to it in empty space. If you are typing a note and you press Enter, it will just go to the next line. I'm going to backspace that out. If you press Escape, then it will think you're canceling, but it will give you an opportunity to keep your changes. So if you answer "Yes", it will keep the note, if you answer "No", it'll throw it away. So I'm going to click the modify tool here, and zoom in on these notes I created. And let me consider this second note that I drew right here, and I'll select it. And I want to point out these two little grip controls that you see at the top of it. The one here on the left is a move control. So all you need to do is click and drag, and that's the easiest way you can move this note around. Now if you move nearby some other note, it will try to line them up. So I look for those opportunities and that makes for a nicer and neater presentation. Now this one is going to rotate the note and you can rotate at any amount you want but by default what happens is if you go past 90 degrees, it will flip it around so that it's not upside down. Now that's controlled by this setting over here called keep readable. So if I were to uncheck that, then the note can be upside down. So if for some reason you need the text note to not be readable or you don't want it to be readable you can uncheck that and have it in whatever orientation you like. So I'm going to go ahead and delete that note but I'm going to keep this one. Now this one, I want to point to something in the model. So when I created this note, I created it without a leader but you can come back and add the leaders afterwards. So there is an opportunity to add leaders on the left or right and either straight or curved. So I'm going to do a left side straight leader like so. Then you get these little grip controls here. Just simply click and drag those to what you want to point at. And then this one in the middle allows you to create a little elbow and a shoulder in the note. And there's our completed note there. If you wish, you can create your note with the leader in a single step. So I'm going to go back to the text tool, and you could create a one segment leader, a two segment leader, or a curved leader. I'm going to do a two segment straight leader. The first click is where the arrow head is. I'm going to point right to this brick soldier course here. The second point is where you want the elbow to be or the shoulder to start. And then your third click is where the text is going to go. And then you just type what you want your note to say. Now again, click next to it, to complete the note. Don't press Enter or Escape. So let's click the modify tool to get out of there. And I'll come back and select this Brick Soldier course note. And now I want to talk about some of the additional options that we have up here on the ribbon. Let's start with add leader. So it's possible to have more than one leader on your note. So we can add leaders to the right, we can add them to the left, and in fact, you can add as many as you need. Now there is a remove leader button right here but sadly it removes 'em in the order they were created. And I say sadly because if I want to keep this one on the left, but remove the one on the right, I need to first remove the left one to get to the right one and then I'd have to add the left one back again. So it's a minor inconvenience but just something you should be aware of. Now that I've got this second leader, I can drag it and point it to some other part of the drawing. Now next to that, you have some leader attachment buttons but to understand those, you really want to have your note wrapped to more than one line. These little dots on the side allow you to narrow the width of the note itself, and it'll take those three words that I have there and kind of wrap them to their own lines. And so it just sort of does that automatically based on the width of the text note. So now you'll notice that the leader is attached to the top of the note, but I could change it to the middle, or the bottom using these icons over here. And you have a similar set of choices for leaders that are on the right hand side. Now you also have these alignment options here. So I could write justify, center justify, or left justify the text, and you see the effect that has on the note. I'm going to go back to left justify and I'm going to stretch it back out to a single line. Now I'm going to place one more note. So I'm going to go back to the text tool and I will click somewhere in this brick field to place the leader, type in the note, click away from it to complete that, click the modified tool to cancel. I want to come back and select the note, and it will probably try to select the geometry. So you might need to use your Tab key to get to the note. So it might take a few tries to Tab in there. Once you have it selected, I'm going to add a leader to the right, adjust the grips to get that to point to something else. And then let me zoom in a little bit closer here, and point out a few more settings on this piece of text. So you'll notice that there is a white opaque background underneath the text. So it does that by default, and that is one of the settings that's controlled by the type properties of the text. So if we click edit type, you can see that there is a background option here and it can either be opaque or transparent. Now I think it looks better with opaque in this case because of the hatch pattern, but it is up to you which one you choose. Now, there are other options in here, things like bold, and italic, the size, the font that's being used. So you can change any of those things, but I just want to caution you, changes you're making in there were type based modifications. So notice that if I went to bold and italic, that actually affected all of my notes and not just here in this view, but everywhere throughout the model. So it might make more sense to not do it there and instead duplicate first and create a new type that was bold and italic. But in this case, I'm just going to turn those options off again and go back to the original settings. However, there is one setting in the type that I do want to modify. I am personally not a fan of this open arrowhead. So I'm going to go back to edit type and change the arrowhead to a filled arrow and click OK. And I think that looks a lot nicer, but you can of course choose whichever arrowhead meets with your preferences. So that gives you a quick overview of the text tool. It's mostly pretty straightforward. There are some other features in there that I think you will find easy to use. In addition to everything I showed you, there is also a spell checker and a find and replace tool that you can explore a little bit. So feel free to do that now if you wish.

Contents