All Capital Letters – ALT

Steve over at Revit OpEd just posted about making the subtotal at the bottom of a Revit Schedule appear in All CAPS. Traditionally, architectural drawings use all caps for all lettering. As Steve points out, this goes back to traditional hand drafting conventions and trying to ensure consistency between various draftspersons. Consistency in lettering is no longer a problem in the computer age, but some habits linger. When email and posting to online web forums first became popular back in the early 90’s many forums had FAQs explaining rules of “online etiquette”. One of these rules was always: “Don’t use ALL CAPS, IT IS LIKE SHOUTING”. I think in this day and age, most online users know this rule now and you don’t see too much all CAP use anymore… that is unless you are looking at architectural drawings and then the All CAPS thing is quite prevalent indeed. Personally, I prefer mixed case. EVEN on architectural drawings. I rarely use the CAP Lock key on my keyboard. However, it is still a pretty common desire among Architects, Designers and Engineers to use all CAPs in documentation.

That brings us back to the subject of Steve’s post. Steve points out that Revit does not offer us a way to make the automatically created labels on Revit schedules such as “Grand Total” in all CAPs. This is a limitation or “feature” of the software depending on your point of view. Steve proposes a work around. Well, this got me thinking if there was another way to achieve this. I decided to do a quick test with fonts. It turns out that to “trick” Revit into doing this automatically without having to use manual text is to use a font that uses only CAPs. I had a few on my system so I did some quick tests.

As you can see, the fonts I had available were not great examples for this application. The Telegrafico font has really small numbers. The Tonio font does not have a dash character and the PTF Nordic font is a bit too bold and rounded. Therefore, consider them “proof of concept.” If you get an acceptable font, (or create one if you know how to do that), then all you have to do is set the Schedule to use this custom “all CAP” font in the Appearance tab.

Thanks for starting the conversation Steve.

2 Responses to All Capital Letters – ALT

  1. Revit Architecture India » All Capital Letters says:
    January 10, 2012 at 10:02 pm

    […] 1/10/2012] Paul Aubin mentions in a follow up POST that we can use a font that only has upper case characters. That’s a trick that a few people […]

    Reply
  2. All Capital Letters ??? ALT Part 2 | Paul F. Aubin says:
    January 11, 2012 at 8:09 am

    […] follow-up to yesterday’s post. I found a few decent fonts for this task. In the screenshot here you can see “Arial […]

    Reply

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