Revit MEP 2010 enhancements

Below are a few enhancements that have been made in Revit MEP 2010 that you may have overlooked...

Printing halftone as thin line

In the Print Setup dialog box in Revit MEP 2010, there is a new option which allows you to Replace halftone with thin lines. This is a major improvement if you have been having problems seeing your (linked) floor plans when printing Revit MEP sheets to a large format printer. In AutoCAD, we are used to creating plot styles which control how lines will appear when printed. This is not the case with the Revit family of products. The print output in Revit is WYSIWYG, or “what you see is what you get”. If a line in your Revit model appears grayscale on the screen, it is going to print grayscale as well. The printer in my office prints grayscale lines so light they hardly show up on the paper. By checking the Replace halftone with thin lines option, grayscale lines will instead print as thin solid lines. This results in (linked) building objects printing darker and more defined in floor plan, section, and elevation views.

Customizing the Quick Access Toolbar

Similar to AutoCAD, Revit now has a Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) along with the new ribbon user interface. The neat thing about the QAT in Revit is that you can easily add additional tools to the toolbar. Do accomplish this, simply right-click on a tool icon within the ribbon and select Add to Quick Access Toolbar. Voila!

Halftone/Underlay Control

New in Revit MEP 2010 is the ability to change how halftone/Underlay objects appear on the screen. You can change the line weight and pattern of underlay lines and the brightness of halftone lines. To edit these settings, go to Manage > Settings > Halftone/Underlay.