From the course: Revit 2026: Essential Training for Architects

Adding text - Revit Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2026: Essential Training for Architects

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Adding text

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- [Instructor] In this video, we're going to look at the Text tool. Text tool is useful for adding notes of any kind that you like to your drawings, and it's pretty straightforward, but let me just go ahead and run through some of the key features. So you can get to the Text tool here on the Quick Access toolbar or on the Annotate tab. You're looking for the big letter A button there, t + x is the shortcut. And when you run the tool, it's as simple as clicking a point where you want to place your note, and then typing in what you want it to say. Now, to get out of text, what you typically want to do is click away from it, sort of click an empty space. There is a tendency, especially if you're coming from other CAD software, to want to press the Enter key here to complete the note. And what that does is, it just simply goes to another line. Also, sometimes folks press Escape. Now, fortunately, Escape does at least give you the chance here to decide. So it says, "Do you want to keep your changes?" So if I said, "No", it would actually throw the note away, and if I answer, "Yes", then it would keep the note and it would just kind of take me out of there. So those are some of the basics of typing a really simple note. What I want to show you now is, if we zoom in just a touch, and you select a existing note, there are these two little controls here. There's a drag control and a rotate control. So with the drag control, you can just move this around, and if you get nearby some other note, it will try and snap to it to keep them lined up. This one will change the orientation of course. And by default, if you wrap around past 90 degrees, it'll actually flip the orientation of the note, that's controlled by this setting right here. So if for some reason you needed your note to be upside down, and you can check that, and it will stop doing that. Now I'm going to just delete this note. I don't really want to keep that one. Now, I'm going to select the original note that I did here. And if you look at the ribbon, you will see that there are several options for leader lines. So you could add either straight or curved leaders on either the left or the right. So I'm going to add a straight leader on the left, and then you'll have these little grip controls here, and you can drag this to point at what you would like it to point at. And then you can use this second grip to add a small shoulder to the elbow there. Alternatively, you could use the arc leader instead, and it would behave in a similar fashion. Now, if you wish, you can create text with a leader as you're drawing it. So I'm going to go back to my Text tool, and you'll see the leader options right here on the Text tool. So we can do a single segment straight leader, a two segment straight leader, or a curved leader. I'm going to do a two segment straight leader. I'm going to point right to this soldier course here, and then notice that it does try to line up with existing leaders. That's really handy. So I'm going to go ahead and click right there, and then there. And then I will type in my note. And again, click an empty white space to finish placement of that note. Now, I'm going to click the Modify tool to cancel out, come back and select this note. And even though it's already got a leader line, you can add additional leader lines on either the left or the right. Now, when I click the right leader one, you'll see an arrow appear over there, the left, it'll add another arrow over there, but there is a Remove button, but unfortunately, it's Remove Last Leader. So if I wanted to remove the one on the right, I do have to go back and remove all of the leaders till I get to that point. And then I would come back and re-add the one on the left. So just something to be aware of that you do have the remove option, but it's not selectable. You don't get to select the one you want to remove, it just goes in order. So now I'm going to take this little grip here and I'm going to point that down to the second soldier course right there. All right, now I'm going to pan over slightly, and I'll add another note here on top of the brick wall. So I'm going to draw my leader first. Type in my note. Again, click an empty space to finish placing it, cancel the command, come back and select that note. Might be a little tricky, because it's trying to select the wall. So you're going to need to use your Tab key, and it might take a few tries to tab in and get to it, but there it is right there, eventually. And I'll add another arrow to the other side here, and then adjust these grips to adjust the way that arrow is pointing. What I wanted you to see here was that text by default has this opaque background behind the text. Now that's a setting that you can get to within the text type. So once again, I'm going to tab in to select this note. And you're not seeing anything about the opaque background here on the properties palette. So what we're going to do is go to Edit Type instead. So we've talked about the Edit Type dialogue in several other instances, here you can see all of the settings that occur at the type level. So you could change the color of your text, you could change the line weight of the leader lines. You could change the amount of offset around the border and the text, which is also controlling how much this little opaque whiteout would be, right? So you could increase it here. This is set to opaque for the background, but you could set it to transparent. When I click Apply, you'll see that now the hatch shows right through the note there. So I think in this case, having the opaque background is probably a little bit nicer, So I'm going to reapply that. You can turn on Bold, you can turn on Italic. So there's a number of things you can do here at the type level. The only thing I want to caution you on is, when I turn that on, of course it does affect the note that I have selected, but because it's a type level modification, that is going to affect all of the notes of that type in this project. So it is just like every other type that we've already discussed. If you wanted to create a version of the text that was Bold and Italic and one that wasn't, then the correct way to do it would be to duplicate first. Okay, what I'm going to do is just simply turn off Bold and Italic here to go back to the original. Now, there is one thing I want to do in the Edit Type that I personally want to change that I'm not going to duplicate for. And that is the type of arrowhead that's being used here. I don't care for this little open arrowhead that they've chosen here. So I'm going to open up a list of choices, and choose something that I like a little better, which is the filled 20 degree arrow. And when I click OK, you're going to see that all of the arrow heads there now are a little bit more bold and substantial. So I personally like that better. Feel free to choose whatever arrowhead you like. So I'm going to add one more note and I'm going to place my leader line and my little shoulder there, and then type in what I want the note to say. And click away from it, and then click the Modify tool to finish. So sometimes you might be in a situation like this where you have notes that are not lined up with one another. It turns out that you can select multiple pieces of text. And over here on the ribbon you have several alignment options. So we could choose things like align them on their centers, or align them on the right, or align them on the left. So that's what I'm going to do here in this case, is choose Align Left, and then of course you can adjust any of the arrowheads that need adjusting after you're done. And that makes for a much neater presentation of those notes. So feel free to explore further on any of those text features that you would like to practice.

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