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  • Publish to PDF

    • Publish to PDF and Dynamic Sheet Lists

    Ideate Automation can be used with Revit 2022+ to export to PDF. There are two methods that you can use to create PDFs. The first, which works for Revit 2022+ requires the use of Ideate BIMLink and has the added benefit of dynamically defining a sheet list. The second method, which only also works for Revit 2022+ does not require Ideate BIMLink and uses a predefined Revit Sheet Set name. See below for details on each of these methods.

      Publish Dynamic Sheet Lists to PDF (2022+)

    Revit sheet sets are a pain to manage because they are not rule based. It’s easy to identify which sheets should be included in a PDF file when there are only 10 sheets to pick from, but in the real world this is hard to manage.

    With Ideate Automation + BIMLink you can create a dynamic list of sheets based on built-in or custom Revit and Ideate BIMLink properties, and then use that list to automatically generate combined or individual PDF files. Examples of the types of dynamic sheet sets you can create within BIMLink for use with Ideate Automation include:

    Follow these instructions to create and publish a dynamic sheet set using Ideate Automation + BIMLink.

    Filter your dynamic Revit sheet list with Ideate BIMLink

    Define a Sheet List

    Use Ideate BIMLink to define a list of sheets by using the Filter and Sorting tabs. In this example we will create a list that is defined by a sheet numbering requirement.

    1. Open your project in Revit 2022 or later. Note that to utilize the sorting function we recommend testing in 2023. The sort order is only supported by the Revit 2023 API for PDFs.
    2. Open Ideate BIMLink from the Ideate Software tab to create a new link definition based on sheets.
      • Select New
      • Choose the By Category method from the left
      • Search and select the Sheets category
      • Select the built-in link called “Sheets” as your starting point, then pick Next.
    3. Refine the list of sheets to include only the ones you want for the PDF
      • Switch to the Filter tab and add a 2nd filter as shown below in the image. 
      • Select the “Elements Must Pass All Filters” checkbox at the top as shown to make both filters a requirement. 
      • With the filters shown below, any new sheet number that begins with “S20” and is not a placeholder sheet will be automatically added to this sheet list.
    4. Switch to the Link tab and modify the name and description as appropriate, such as “Sheets — S20” for the example above. The name field is important because it will be used in the next step to publish this list. 
    5. Save the Revit file to save this link definition within the project.

    TIPS:

    select the revision sequence

    Set the Sort Order

    1. If you are using Revit 2023+ you can also control the sort order. In 2022 the sorting will be ignored and publish the sheet list based on the number field only.
      • Switch to the Sort tab 
      • Add one or more properties to control the sort order. If you need to add a property to the available properties, switch to the Properties tab to add that property first, then use the Sort tab option.
    2. Save the Revit file to save this link definition within the project.

    Publish a Dynamic Sheet List

    To publish the sheet list made using the steps above follow these steps.

    1. Close Revit if it is still open. Before we launch Ideate Automation we need to ensure that the required Revit versions are not in use.
    2. Launch Ideate Automation from the Desktop or shortcut.
    3. From the Home page, select the New button to create a new task.
    4. From the Ideate Software Scripts folder, select the folder called 01 Publishing, then pick the script at the right called “IBL-Export-Combined_PDF”.
    5. Review the description of this task below, then pick Next.
    6. Set each of the required variables for this task as follows:
      • Revit Files  — pick the Revit file you modified in the above section. Note that you can select multiple files here, but each file would need to have the same link definition name. Automation can also be used to automatically import an externally defined name (.link file). Contact support if you need help customizing your script.
      • Export Folder — Pick a location to place the pdf sheets. 
      • BIMLink Sheet List value, input the name you used in step #4 under Define a Sheet List. Leave the last two variable as-is and select Next.
    7. On the Confirm Tasks Selection page, review all variables and note that the Task name is editable.
    8. Edit the Task name to “AUT-Export-PDF-List-one project”
    9. Ensure that Revit is not open, then select Save and Run.

    Dynamic sheet list example

    TIP: The PDF Export Setting values, which applies only to version 2022+ and can be used to control the PDF file naming when the individual PDF scripts are used. You can learn more about this in this blog: Exporting PDFs from Revit

    Publish Revit Sheet Sets to PDF (2022+)

    If you prefer to publish to PDF by using a pre-defined Revit sheet set with version 2022 or later, you can learn how to do this by following the detailed instructions in our Getting Started Guide

    Edit the Revit sheet set

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