Learn how to effectively use the label and text options in your family creations. This guide provides a step-by-step explainer on the mechanics and benefits of using labels, demonstrating how to tag different doors, and adjust your units for various parameters when creating content.
Key Insights
- The article explains how to use labels and text in family creations. Labels work by asking the user questions upon placement, thereby allowing the system to draw fields from the category to insert specific details. In contrast, text appears exactly as it is input by the user.
- When tagging doors, the label option is advantageous. Labels can reference fields from the door category, making it possible to add door numbers or other specific data. The use of placeholder values is encouraged for ease of editing.
- The tutorial further describes how to change the units from feet and inches to just inches. This involves using the unit symbol to adjust the project settings. This tip is particularly beneficial when detailing the width and height of doors in a project.
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Now let's go ahead and add those labels in. From my Create tab, I have the option for label, and I have the option for text. Both of these are going to look exactly the same in my family, but one of them is going to work, and the other one is not.
So the difference here is text is going to just appear exactly as it sits here. If I had something like that, it would look exactly the way you see it. With a label, you can see as I go in and place a label, I'm going to be asked some questions.
When I go to click and place my label in here, it's asking me exactly what I'm looking for. So because it's a door, it's going to grab fields from the door category, and then I can go in and I can find mark, which is going to be our door number, and I can add that to the label. What I like to do here is I like to add the sample value, so I don't necessarily know exactly what nomenclature we'll use for the project, but typically we'll use a three-digit number, so like 101 for door 1 on floor 1, door 01 on floor 1 here.
So I can click OK at that point, and then I can see the label. And I always go in and I'll just use the Directional Pad on the keyboard to kind of nudge these around. They don't really snap to a center point, so you just get it as close as you can, and typically that's going to be good enough.
You can tell I got it pretty close there. One thing you may notice is that as I move it around up and down here, it is cutting into the tag, and that's because the label type is opaque, and if you wanted that to not happen or you didn't want to run the risk of it cutting up your tag, you can change this to transparent, and that's part of the type parameter of this system family label. So this 101 is really just a placeholder.
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Every time we tag a different door, it's going to adopt that number for us. This next one here will be our door width but in inches, so I'll use the label again, and just like we did before, when I click to place it, it's going to ask me some questions, unlike the text, which I just manually input. If we click in here, I'm going to look for door width and add that parameter, and the difference is I want to change the units from feet and inches to just inches, and to do that, I can use the unit symbol—which is the pound sign—that we can use, to change the units from project settings, which is set to feet and inches, to just inches, and you'll notice when you change it that you have to input a unit symbol, and we'd like to just use the standard, the quote symbol here for that, and click OK.
Just like before, I want to make sure I add in a sample value, and that would be 36 inches here, and we'll click OK, and I'm going to shrink it down because it doesn't make sense to have that so large, and then I'll move it into a location that makes sense for me. So that looks pretty good, and what I'll do is I'll just copy this one over. I could have placed another label.
It's pretty much the same process, but let's say we needed to edit one. This is what you would do. If you select it, you can go to edit label, and from edit label, we'll just take away the width parameter, and I'm looking for height now, and I'll add that one, and I'll just go through the same process of adjusting our units to inches, adding that symbol, and clicking OK, and one thing I noticed here is that we want to make sure we're actually on fractional inches because if we don't use fractional inches, it'll give us like, you know, 36.5 if we aren't on an even inch there, so I'll go back and fix that other one as well, but I want to make sure that we have these set up to be the way that it's going to look in our project, and so we'll just double check to make sure these are done correctly by changing my units, and so this will be fractional inches.
There we go, and so now we have the door tag set up with the door mark, which is we're using for the door number, the width in inches, and the height in inches, so I'll go ahead and do a Save As Family, and we'll call this one Door Tag Width Height, and that'll be the door tag we'll use for our project, so I'll hit save, and then we'll do a Load into Project, make sure you're on your BIM 201 file, and hit okay, and then we're ready to go.
