From the course: Revit 2025: Essential Training for Architecture

Adding text - Revit Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2025: Essential Training for Architecture

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Adding text

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- [Instructor] In this video, I'd like to show you the text tool. Now, the text tool is largely self-explanatory, but there are a few features that are worth noting, and so let's just go ahead and run through the tool. But overall, you're going to find it as pretty straightforward. So there's a couple places you can get to it. It is up here on the quick access toolbar. You can get there from the annotate tab right here, or you can just use the keyboard shortcut of TX. Now, when you run the text tool, there are some options available on the ribbon, and you'll notice right here that we can either create text without a leader, or we could create it with a one or two segment leader, or a curved leader. Now I'm going to show you some of the leader options a little bit later, but for now I'm just going to create a piece of text and I'll just sort of click somewhere on the screen and start typing in the note that I want to place. Now, this is the first thing I want you to get used to when working with text in Revit. There's a tendency to want to press Enter here in order to complete the note. You'll see that that just simply puts you to the next line and keeps you within the note. Sometimes folks want to press Enter there, but when you do that, it's going to say, "Are you sure? Do you want to keep your changes?" Now you can answer yes and continue, or you could answer no and throw the note away. So I'll answer yes, but the right way to get out of a note or the easiest way to get out of a note is to actually click next to it. So if I just click an empty white space next to the note, that will complete the typing and it won't display any messages. And so it's not wrong to do it the other way, it's just a little bit more efficient to get in the habit of clicking next to it. So I wanted to point that out to you. Okay, so now I'm going to just zoom in on this note here that I just created, and I want to point out to you those two little icons at the top. This one right here on the left is a drag cursor, and you can use that to move the note around. So that can be the easiest way to relocate a note. If you get nearby another piece of text, then it will sense where that text is and they will try to line up with one another. So be on the lookout for that. Now the second little icon here allows you to rotate the note. So if you need it to be at some angle other than horizontal, you can do that. If you rotate past 90 degrees, by default, it will flip it so that it remains readable. That is controlled by this little check box over here on the properties palette. If you uncheck this, it will allow you to have an upside down note. So in the case where you need the note to be upside down, just remember to uncheck keep readable. Otherwise, if that is turned on, then it will automatically reorient it for you. Now I'm going to delete this note and let's come back and reconsider this one. So let's say that I have this one right here, and what I want to do is I want to start pointing that to something in the model. So with the notes selected, you will see those leader options that we were talking about a little while ago. We can place leaders on the left or the right side, and we can use straight lines or curved lines to create those leaders. So I'll let you choose whichever one you want, but I'm going to do a left oriented straight leader and it will give me these two little grip controls. So what you do is you simply drag these to point at the item that you want to call out, and then optionally, you can adjust this second grip here to create a little shoulder for the note. And it's really just that simple to create a note with a leader line. Now if you wish, you can create the text note and the leader line in a single step. So I'm going to deselect that, go back to my text tool, and I will go to this two segment leader option right here. And this will allow me to first click where I want the arrow to point to. So I'm going to point to this brick soldier course here. The next click will be where you want that shoulder point to be. Notice that it is able to line up with the existing one. So I'm going to click there. And then the final point is going to line up with the existing leader. And then you simply type in your note. Now again, don't press Enter, just click away from it to complete the typing. So once I've done that, I can click the modify tool to finish out of the command. I can come back and select it. And you're still able to add leaders on either side, both the right and the left. So notice that a single note can have multiple leaders. Now, we can also remove leaders using this button here, but sadly this removes the last leader. So that means if I wanted to remove the leader on the right, I have to first remove the second one on the left, then the one on the right, and then I have to come back and re-add the one on the left. So it's a minor inconvenience, but something you should be aware of. So I can take this grip now and I can point that down to something else. And so it's easy to have a single note point to multiple elements. Now let me create another one, but here, right on top of the brick wall. So I'm going to deselect everything, go back to text. This time I'm going to just do, well, let's stick with the leader actually. I'm going to go ahead and point the leader right here, and then maybe here, and like so, type in my note, click away from it, cancel with the modify. I want to come back and select. Notice it's a little tricky. You might need to use your tab key, and it might take a few tries of tabbing to get there, but I'm going to select the note, add another leader line on the right, point to somewhere here, add my elbow like so. And what I wanted you to notice here is that by default text has a masking option. So there is an opaque background on this piece of text. Now that is controlled inside the text type. So like other elements in Revit, you can select the object. And on the properties palette is an edit type button. And when I click that, you can see that among several other settings is the background setting here. And the choices are opaque and transparent. So if you set it to transparent, now the brick shows right through, I think it actually reads a little nicer in this case, leaving it opaque. But I wanted you to see the two choices there. Now, there are other options here as well. You could make the text bold, you could make it italic. But just be careful because if I make that change here in this dialogue, remember that that is a type based modification and that applies to all instances of that type throughout your entire project, not just this view, but everywhere. So that might be something that you want to think about a little more carefully and possibly duplicate and create a dedicated bold type or a dedicated italic type instead. So in this case, I'm simply going to turn those off and click okay. However, there is one change I want to make to the type that I do want to be global, and I don't want to duplicate the type for. And that is the arrowheads. I'm not a fan of those open arrowheads. So what I'm going to do is change the arrowhead choice right here, and I'm going to choose a filled 20 degree. You can choose whichever one that you like, but I think that looks a lot nicer, like so. Now one last thing I want to show you. I'm going to add one more note and I'll do it with a leader and I'll just sort of point to the roof here. And I'm going to place this one a little bit randomly and then finish the note and click the modify tool to cancel. You're able to select multiple notes, and on the ribbon you will have some alignment options. So notice that we can align the elements to left or to right and center, and we can also align them in the horizontal and vertical directions. So for example, if I choose this center alignment option here, now, all of those pieces of text are lined up based on their center. If I did right, they're going to move over there and if I do left, they're going to move over there. So what you're able to do is just very quickly take a big collection of text and kind of rearrange them so that everything is lined up nicely. And then of course, they will continue to stay lined up as long as you pay attention to those alignment vectors when you're moving those around. So, something for you to explore a little bit further.

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