Monday, March 20, 2017

Revit 2017 and Windows DPI Text Scaling Issue

Revit 2017 has a new text engine, and as many already know, this can cause some formatting issues when upgrading a pre-2017 file. I talk about that in my AECbytes article What's New in Revit 2017 and show an example. This is by design and requires one-time manual adjustments to correct.

There is another text-related issue with Revit 2017 that is not by design. The problem is not with formatting, but with parts of text disappearing as seen in the next two images.

Text appears properly
Portion of text elements missing

The problem steams from team members having different DPI Scaling settings, aka text scaling, set on their computer for the same project. Check out this Windows blog post for more on DPI Scaling.

The person who created the text, at their DPI Scale setting, can see the text just fine. However, if someone opens the project with a different DPI Scale setting they may see cropped text as shown above. Apparently the DPI Scaling ever-so-slightly affects the text size but this does not cause a regeneration of the text in Revit. Not only is this a problem on the screen, it also prints that way!

When the person who original created the text opens the file again everything looks and prints fine.

The solution is for everyone to have the same DPI Scale setting until this is resolved by the developers at Autodesk. This can be a challenge for staff who need this adjustment to help their eyesight. Those using 4k monitors also change this setting - or it is automatically changed for them by Windows.

The Fix for someone having this problem, and they need to see and print the text, is to make a small edited to each text's Type Properties and then undo that change... this will force a regeneration. Or, of course, some API or Dynamo magic would help!

Fun stuff.