Equal Spacing Trick

No, not THAT equal spacing trick. Well, it is that one, but it’s a tweak on it. It’s not ONLY that one.

Recently, I was having a nice chill Q&A session on Revit families and we, of course, starting talking about things other than families. A user had an issue where she wanted her windows equally spaced. Yeah, we all know the EQ trick on the dimensions. You dimension a bunch of items, click the EQ toggle and Revit magically does math and spaces them all the same distance.

It’s Magic!!!

But she didn’t actually want that. She wanted the space BETWEEN the windows to be equal. And no math.

Luckily, we came up with a solution. We had to start with a reference plane the width of the windows past the end of the wall. And then, instead of dimensioning to the center of the windows, we dimensioned to the edge, and included the reference plane. The plane was kind of like a phantom window, so when we hit EQ, it all lined up!

Booyah!

Not the traditional way, but way easier than doing a bunch of math!

 

 

Font Mishaps – or – Where is that crazy BOX key

Our good buddy Revit uses the Windows installed fonts for all of its font needs.  This isn’t just for fonts used in your text and dimensions, but also fonts that the ribbon and help files and other “software-y” stuff needs.

A former co-worker sent me an email recently with an odd problem that he was having on a PC in Revit Arch 2010.  The ribbon, the drop downs, even the search text in the help search box was showing up as a bunch of boxes:

What the what?

Having spent some time in the Windows Character Map program (don’t ask – I don’t like to relive those days) I recognized those boxes as characters that a font didn’t have access to.  Except in this case, it was ALL the characters.

Must be a bad font, or missing font in Windows.  But what font was Windows trying to use to fill out the Revit interface?  Time for some digital sleuthing…

• A quick Google search turned up nothing worthwhile. 
• A fast check in the help file brought up nothing as well.
• I did a screen capture of my non-boxey interface and uploaded it to http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/ to see if the “magical cloud” could figure it out.

My searches turned up nothing.  So I made a guess.

When we deployed Office 2007 in our firm, I remember reading about Microsoft getting hooked on Calibri for the new default.  So, I wrote my coworker back and told him to see if Calibri was installed on that PC; if it wasn’t install it… if it was, delete it and install it again.

That was the trick!  Calibri is the magic font that will allow you to actually read your Revit interface.  Once he installed the font and restarted Revit, everything showed up fine.