Tuesday 17 November 2009

Subscript - Superscript and Symbols!

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In Revit we don’t currently have the ability to enter superscript or subscript and special or greek symbols and we use these kind of things all the time.

Area m²
Volume m³
Density kg/m³
Stress N/mm²
Degrees i.e. roof pitch 36°
Tolerance to be ± 5mm, etc
Diameter i.e. 22Ø Bolt

Being an old fart, and someone who used pre MS-DOS machines, and DOS Versions of AutoCAD, I know that ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is the standard format used for text files within computers and online.

As computers can only understand numbers, the ASCII code is the numerical representation of alphabetic and special characters, such as

155 = ø
157 = Ø
167= º
171 = ½
172 = ¼
241 = ±
243 = ¾
248 = °
251 = ¹
252 = ³
253 = ²

If you know the keystroke value of the special character you want to insert, you can insert the special character directly into your document by using your keyboard.

To do so, open the document and position the cursor where you want the special character to appear. Then, with NUM LOCK on, press and hold the ALT key, and then press the keys on the numeric keypad that represent the keystroke value of the character you want to input.

After you finish typing, release the ALT key, and Windows generates the character you specified.


Perhaps the next version of Revit will give us direct control for Superscript, subscript and symbols with Text line AutoCAD has had for some time.
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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

lifesaver!

Anonymous said...

Doesn't say anything about Subscripts which is why i visited this page..

Anonymous said...

Although it's mentioned in the title,it does not say anything about subscripts.

Jim PM said...

Subscript is not supported under ASCCI but you can find it in unicode (Alt-key+2082 gives subscript 2).

Unfortunately most fonts in Revit does NOT support many Unicode special characters. ISOCPEUR that is common for AutoCAD does though, so use that one when you really need those special characters.

To find Unicode special characters just websearch for 'Unicode' and the written name of the special character, ie 'subscript 2'.

An even easier way that mostly works is to use windows standard program CHARMAP (Windows-key+R and write 'charmap' to find a special character and copy paste, or use any y text or wordprocessors Charactertool to write the characters in question and copy paste into revit. Still using ISOCPEUR font that is.