Lighten-up Overbearing Architectural Room or Door Tags

Many door and room tags in the architect's Revit file are just really large and dark when they are linked into your Revit MEP project. They can also mask out MEP content like lights and diffusers. We can bring them down a notch by editing these families in the linked architects project file. Here's how you do it.

Open the Architects project file, find an offending tag and select it. In the options bar there will be a button that says Edit Family. Click the button and select "Yes" when asked if you want to open the family for edit.

Once in the family, feel free to just delete any part of the tag you don't want like square feet in a room tag. Select the room name text and access it's element properties via the right click menu or the properties button. In the Element Properties dialog select the Edit/New button shown below.

The Type Properties dialog opens. Make three changes here.

1. Change the Background to "Transparent".  This turns off the text mask on the text.
2. Change the Text Font to "Simplex".  Simplex will not fatten up like Arial.
3. Change the Width Factor to "0.8". Simplex tend to be wide, this will keep things thin.

Now select the "Load into Projects" button located at the bottom of the design bar. If you have multiple projects open, Revit will ask you to identify which projects to load the altered family into.

Revit will switch back to the architects project file and ask if you want to overwrite the family. Yes you do. Revit may also tell you that it needs to make the family editable first. Just say Yes again, and the family will update.

Save the architects project file then close it. If it is a central file, ensure that you relinquish all of yours. Finally close the family. Say No when Revit asks if you want to save the changes. The changes have already been saved into the architects project file and don't need to be saved or changed outside of that file.