Adding text - Revit Architecture Tutorial

- [Instructor] Nearly any construction document needs to have notes and descriptions on screen and we can add such things in our Revit views using the text notes command. So I'm going to be working in an elevation view but you can add text notes to any view in your Revit project. So we can get to the text note command on the quick access toolbar using the big letter A button here or we can go to the annotate tab and click on the text button here or type t + x which is the keyboard shortcut. Now for the first note, I'm just going to kind of click up here off the the left hand side of the screen and type in a note. To finish typing a note, you click next to it in empty white space. Now that can take a little bit of getting used to because when you're typing the note, there can be this instinct to press the enter key to finish. If you press the enter key, you'll notice that it'll just go to the next line and if you press it again, it'll go to the next line again. If you press escape trying to get out, then you'll find that you're actually canceling the note command. Now they do give you an opportunity to keep your changes right here by answering yes or if you click no, then the note disappears. So definitely something that you want to kind of be aware of. So if I create the note again, just remember to click next to it to finish. Now after you create a note, you'll notice that it's got these two little grip controls here. So you can use this one with the four-headed arrow to move the note around and you can use this one here to actually rotate it. If you rotate it far enough, it'll actually flip the note so that it stays right reading. So that's just an interesting little behavior. So let me go ahead and delete that note. Now I'm going to direct my attention back to this first note that I created and it's just sort of sitting of to the side and I probably want to have it point into the drawing in some way. So I'm going to zoom in a little bit here. And with the note selected, notice that there's a leader panel here on the modify tab. You can add straight or curved leaders on either the left or the right. So I'm going to add a straight leader on the right and then use these small little grips here to adjust the shape of the leader and where it is pointing. Now when I go back to the text command, I have the option of actually creating a piece of text with a leader in the same step. So instead of having to create it first and then add the leader, you can choose your leader options here. You've got a one-segment straight leader, a two-segment straight leader or a curved leader. So I'm going to choose a two-segment straight leader and now the first point I click will actually be the end point of the arrowhead. So I'm going to point right at this brick soldier course, start moving away from the drawing. Notice that it will allow me to line this leader up with the existing leader. So I'm going to line it up at both clicks and then begin typing. Now remember, click next to it in empty white space to finish the note. It looks a little strange right now but as soon as you click notice that the note will jump off to the left and it will maintain the points of the leader that you clicked. So Revit assumes that the leader that you designated is what you want to maintain and it just places the note next to it. Now that's despite the fact that if I cancel out of the command and select this note, it's actually set to left justification, it's aligned left. Now it in fact is aligning left. If I took this little grip here, I can drag the size of the text box and make it a little bit narrower, and that will force the note to word wrap. And of course, when it word wraps, you'll notice that it is word wrapping with a left alignment. Now there is the opportunity to change it to a right alignment or a center alignment but I'm going to set it back to left and then I'm going to drag this back again so that it goes back to being a single line. Notice that when it does that, the leader will correct itself and snap back to its original position. Now another option is to take this Parapet Cap note here and using the little drag control, I can drag it. And notice that when it gets nearby the start of the Brick Soldier Course note it will snap to it. Then I can take these grips and adjust the notes like so. So you have a great deal of control over exactly how you place the notes and what portions of them are aligned with what other notes. Now, let me zoom out a little bit and show you that if I go back to selecting this Brick Soldier Course note, on the leader panel there's buttons to add leaders to this existing note. So you're not limited to just a single leader. You can add leaders to the left and you can add additional leaders to the right. Now you can add as many leaders as you want on both left and right but unfortunately, if you decide you want to remove some of the leaders, the button here is to remove the last leader. In other words, you don't get to pick the one you want to remove. You have to actually remove them in the order they were created. So if I wanted to get rid of this one on the left, I have to remove all of the ones up the that point and then I could add back a new leader on the right. So that's a slight inconvenience but I think it's still pretty handy that we can add additional leaders to our notes. And so now I can take this one Brick Soldier Course note and point it to both of the Soldier Courses. Now I'm going to look over here at this portion of the elevation, go back to my text note command and this time go back to just creating a note without a leader. I'm going to click right here on top of the brick pattern and type in a note for this brick pattern and just sort of click anywhere to finish. Now if we zoom in, notice that the text actually has a built in mask behind the text. Now that's actually one of its type properties. So just like every other element in Revit, text has category, family and type. So with this note selected, I can click the edit type button here on the properties palette and you'll see that the family is a system family called Text, the type is a type called 2.5mm Arial. Now there are other types available but the properties down below control this particular type and you'll see that the background is currently set to opaque and I can set that to transparent and click apply to see the result. Now I think when you're putting notes on top of a pattern like that brick pattern, it works a little bit better when you leave it opaque, so I'm going to set that back to opaque. Now there are other settings in here as well. You can change the font that's being used, the size of the font that's being used, you can make it bold or italic and you can apply in between to see any of these changes. Now if I click OK here and zoom out, that actually italicized that entire type which means that all of the notes here became italic. So I'm going to go back to edit type and turn that off but I do want to make one change to this type. Notice that I'm using these open arrowheads over here and I might like to use a different arrowhead. So under leader arrowhead, you have lots of other choices and I want to try a filled arrowhead instead. And I think I like that better so I'm going to click OK there and accept that change. Now let me zoom out and give myself some room here and I'm going to create a new text note right here. Now I could begin typing but this one's going to be a rather lengthy note. What you can also do is open up another program. It could be Microsoft Word, it could be Windows Notepad, any text editing program. So I happen to have Notepad open and I've typed in this rather lengthy note here. So I'm going to select all of this text, Control + C, then I'm going to click back into Revit and I'm going to click right here and do Control + V to paste that text into this note. So notice that you can borrow text from any other program and bring it into a text note. Now I still need to click next to it to finish typing, so that's what I'm going to do. Now when we zoom out here, you can see that by default, it will just size the width of the text note as wide as it needs to be to accommodate each sentence in the note. At the end of the word description, I pressed enter in Notepad to go to a second line. So that's why it's wrapping at that location. But what I'm going to do is select this note, click this little grip right here and as you've already seen we can reduce the width of this text note and it will word wrap within each paragraph. So if I now zoom in here, you can see this is a really long note paragraph and then enter and then this is a new line and so on. Now, if you click into that note, you're now editing that note and instead of italicizing the entire text type, if you wanted to, you could just select individual words within the note and italicize those. And of course you can do underline and you can do bold. So you have several different formatting options. Right here, I said there's a footnote. Well, I could take that number at the end there and turn it into a superscript so that it's a more appropriate format for a footnote. Now here, I have a list of items, so I'm going to drag through all of these items and I have several list options here. So I could make it a bullet list or a numeric list or an alpha list. So I'm going to go back to a numeric list. Now here, these next three lines say that they are sub items. So I can select those items here and use the increase indent to force those to become sub items. And in fact I could select this sub sub item and do it again and you can see each time I do that, it will indent it a little further. Now at this point, it's bumping up again the right hand side of my text note width there and it's kind of wrapping in an odd way. So what I'm going to do is click this close button here to close the text editor, I'm going to keep it selected and go back to edit text type and this distance right here is a little bit large and that's the tab distance there that's being used for each of those steps on the indenting. So you can actually change this tab size to anything you want. So I'm going to drop that down to just 5mm and then click apply and then I'll click OK and you can see that now I have a much more compact list. So there's a lot of different formatting options available inside a text note and as you can see, you're not even required to type those notes directly in Revit if you prefer to type them outside of Revit in another text editor, you can easily copy and paste that text directly into your text note elements.