That's impossible...isn't it?

Publishing Revit sheets to PDF & DWG in a matter of seconds

The problem Working with Autodesk Revit invokes both joy and frustration, and for a long time, we were frustrated that every small change you might want to make to a Revit drawing involved so much time and effort. As software developers, we want to make things easier and faster for our customers, but the tools just aren’t there. Take the situation that you need to issue some drawings on a project that’s working to ISO 19650. As part of the process you need to change the name of each PDF so that it includes the Suitability Code and the Revision, but these need to change on the title block too and those changes also need to take into account each drawing’s history. The solution - or so we thought... To a software developer, this is fairly simple and it will be no surprise that our document and drawing management software handles all of that automatically. The problem that bothered us, however, was that users still had to go back into Revit to publish the updated sheets. Sure, there are tools that can batch process in Revit, but you are still at the mercy of Revit’s performance. Models can be huge, so the combined time to both load the model and then render each of the sheets to PDF is considerable. This is the time when both the machine and the user are tied up waiting. So, I was delighted to be able to announce back in August that we had cracked this problem and that we can now edit a Revit sheet and create a new updated PDF in a matter of seconds per sheet and without opening Revit– magic! You can learn more about this here. This is a huge improvement and something that we were delighted with until some customers told us that they also need a DWG of each Revit sheet, so they will still have to pop back into Revit to create those. No problem we thought, we can just export the sheet to DWG and then use some existing DWG editing code of ours to update the attributes…but we hit a brick wall. When Revit creates a DWG, it turns all your lovely title block text into MTEXT rather than attributes. MTEXT doesn’t have the unique identifiers that attributes have or the positional justification. So, we were stumped - but thankfully not for too long. The actual solution

We will be showcasing the huge time savings from our PDF processing in our ”Speeding up your Revit workflows with data management” webinar on 20th November and hope to include the new DWG handling in future webinars. So, if you would like to see this feature of our document and drawing management software in action, register for our webinar here.