Blueprint

This looks sweet. That is all.

Firefox Printing Problem

I was having an issue with printing from Firefox.  The page looked fine on screen, but when it printed, it printed garbage.  Hardly any normal characters, most of them had accents.  I finally fixed it!
In Firefox - Tools - Options

Go to Content, Choose a different Default font than “Times New Roman”, Tahoma looks nice. Or Calibri if you have it.  The problem is that there is something wrong with 'Times'.

One other thing that might happen - Websites that insist on using 'Times'.  Click on Advanced... Unselect 'pages choose their own fonts'

Everything works now!

Revit Nursing Home

I've been working on this large Revit project more.  It's a nursing home with various wings and corridors and such.  Many of the rooms are the exact same layout or very similar.  Knowing our company, I knew there would be many design changes from the point I started working.  I found a time-saver called Groups. I could lay out a typical patient room with the lights, outlets, fire alarm, whatnot and copy this whole thing as one piece to an identical room.  What's better is that I could layout tags in a group too.  Now if the rooms need something different, I just had to edit one room and all the others would update.  GENIUS!!!
Not so much.  Groups have slowed the model down to a crawl.  It takes 30+ minutes to open.  Updating a group like in the above situation takes another 30 minutes.  It looks nice though, all the rooms looks exactly like each other, symmetry.
What's the solution?  Un-group everything is one option.  It will leave the items where they are, but changes won't copy to the other rooms.  Things could still change, so this isn't good.  One thing I read was to make it a family.  I really don't think that will work.  These rooms have multiple walls and a ceiling with elements all over... Plus the groups are made already and it would be a lot of work to erase all my groups and replace them with families.  None of these work for me at the moment.  I have to keep these pain-inducing groups for now.  I don't close Revit at the end of night.  Opening it takes too much out of the day.  I save over 2 hours a week by leaving it open.
Lesson learned.

Work Rant

We have a large project we are working on in Revit.  A while ago, we did a test job and it was decided we needed to upgrade our systems to work on this large project.  We got them less than a year ago.
What are they?  HP Z600s.  After our tech asked me to find him some numbers from BOXX and the like and building our own systems, he went with the lowest Z600 he could find.  It's a Quad Core Xeon.  Xeon's are great for people doing multiprocessor, or large amounts of ram.  Our system has 3GB.  Seriously, that's it.  It's 2.0 Ghz. It doesn't have hyper-threading, not that the version of Revit we are running uses it.  Think of the future at least!  We also have Windows XP installed...
Revit runs horribly slow.  Takes too long to open, to save, close, move something, circuit something, etc.
What are our upgrade options?  More Ram.  6GB or 12GB at current prices is $170/$340.  But what good is ram without a 64 bit OS.  We can't upgrade to a 64 bit OS because we'd loose everything.  We can't have downtime like that.
What am I saying?  Spend the extra $$$ in the beginning to get something somewhat decent.  I am crippled by OS, why stay with XP?  Windows 7 was out when these were purchased.  At 64-bit Windows 7, we could have stayed on it till ram prices dropped to their current prices.  Or, for whatever price they paid for these systems, I could have made something superior cheaper.  You don't need tech support, that's what in-house people are for.  Ugh.  2 Ghz... Dream machines. :rolleyes:

Blowing things up!

Did you know there were other options then Exploding a block?  Didn’t know you could explode a block?  Don’t know what explode does? 

Find all this and more – FREE in this edition of Tips N Tricks!

Original Block

A lovely block.  But what if you need to change some aspect of it and don’t want to redraw the whole thing?  EXPLODE it!?

Explode

On most blocks it breaks it apart and places everything back to the layer it was created on.

This works fine on borders and titles where you need to change the default text – everything is on the correct layer and will stay that way after you explode.

Doors, lights, toilets, Elevation tags, etc will end up on layer 0 like the image and take work.

Explode Polylines into individual lines; Dimensions and hatches into separate lines; paragraphs of MText separate into single lines. 

Xplode

This will let you choose some options such as color, layer, & line style after it explodes.

This is good for large blocks from manufacturers that have crazy colors and plot wrong.  Tell it to make colors and lines ‘BYLAYER’ and place it on a layer, such as E-Demo and you are all set.

This will not separate polylines, dimensions, etc.  It only works on blocks.

Burst

This explodes the block but keeps the layer and text the same.

This is great if your block is close to what you need but you don’t want to re-enter the text.

This will not separate polylines, dimensions, etc.  It only works on blocks.

Easy and pain-free

Burst – the better block blower upper ©

Bonus Exploding TNT:

TXTEXP

Explodes text into lines and curves.

AutoCAD Tip : Creating your own Key Stroke Shortcut

This creates a new shortcut key for an AutoCAD command.

You might be familiar with:
Ctrl + S : Save, Ctrl + O : Open. Use this to add your own.

Go to Tools | Customize | Interface...

Find the command you would like to create a shortcut for:


I have chosen 'Multiline Text' here.

Also, open up "Keyboard Shortcuts | Shortcut Keys", like in the image below.








Next drag the highlighted command up to 'Keyboard Shortcuts | Shortcut Keys"



















Click on the dots (...) I don't know what they are called.



















A new window pops up, press the key combination you would like.



Now, whenever I press Ctrl+T, it will start Multiline Text.


OK



Apply, and OK!



















Now test it out and create your own.

OUTSTANDING!