Autodesk: AEC Media Day, Revit 2011 Text & Labels

Well, technically media day is tomorrow, but it started tonight with a reception. Quite the crowd they've brought in, and I appreciated being invited and entertained too. Steve Stafford, David Light David Harrington, Lachmi Khemlani and more were all there.

Tomorrow we get down to all the "real" release info, a chance to ask questions, and perhaps, if we're lucky some goodies that we probably won't be allowed to blog about anyway (pesky NDAs....).

Text & Labels

A small, but possibly overlooked new feature in 2011 is a change to Text and Labels (you may have already heard Text is going to support bullets, numbering and several other new features).  What I want to focus on in this post is the new border feature.

In both text and label types you can check to show a border around the text in the object. The size of the border is controlled by the size of the text/label box and the offset in the type properties. I tend to equate the offset to being the "margin" around the text, but since this offset also controls where a leader terminates, I guess they've used the correct term.

Of course, this means you better start thinking about redoing all your tags and annotations! Think of all those families with boxes draw with symbolic lines, that don't adapt to text size! No longer a problem, with the border feature. Line weight of the line is controlled by way of the Text/Label type properties. However, its important to note that the box and any associated leaders will have the same line-weight. It also means that the line-weight will be consistent in all views. The only way to override the line weight is an object specific override. It would be preferable possibly useful if the leader and border had their own subcategories, under annotation categories, but perhaps next year..... On second thought, perhaps it should remain a type property? Or possibly, both? Allow the base value to be defined in Object Styles, overrides in Visual Styles, and then, last a property in Type Properties that has "By Category" by default.