by Dennis Collin
When producing service drawings AutoCAD has a nice powerful linetype editor that works with user definable shape files which means pretty much any type of linetype can be defined reasonably easily by the user.
Revit on the other hand is quite different. Yes you can customise length of dashes and spaces in the line pattern editor but there is no easy way of introducing shape files (from AutoCAD or elsewhere) and have it applied to a linestyle like in CAD.
However as you can see above it is possible to apply tag families to elements using objects like Conduits in coarse or medium detail to serve as cabling routes. Indeed conduits are ideal in this regard as they have an instance parameter called service type which can be specified and then annotated with a conduit tag.
This is achieved by creating a Generic Tag family, categorise it as a conduit tag.
NB. Remember to delete the text note!!
Create a label referring to the Service Type parameter from a conduit component.
Then save the family and load into the appropriate project file.
Once the family is loaded use the ‘TAG ALL’ feature choosing the saved conduit tag or if more control is required, select the elements first and just tag selection. The tags will move with the conduit and will disappear should the conduit category be turned off.