I’ve been struggling to find a good workflow to create a list of keynotes. Commonly used in Architectural construction documents.
By this I mean: create an editable numeric list in which a KEY number corresponds to a longer text description VALUE.
These numbers would then be used in a drawing layout as a type of annotation object. I.e. a leader note ‘03’ is used multiple times on a sheet. Each leader ‘03’ points to, for example, a specific type of door. A large block of text (index) appears elsewhere on the sheet:
Generic text description linked to the key ‘01’
Generic text description linked to the key ‘02’
Text description of the special type of door referenced as keynote ‘03’
These lists can get very long
And often need to be shuffled around
I.e. note ‘03’ is pushed to note ‘06’ in the numeric list
and the corresponding text must also jump to ‘06’
and all keynotes on the sheet that once said ‘03’ must also update to ‘06’
You can almost do this with DocumentUserText. But not quite. Text Fields allow you to reference a VALUE from a long list, but not the KEY. So I can link the keynote ‘03’ to a Text Field that says ‘Text description of the special type of door’. But there is no Text Field that spits out the KEY value ‘03’.
For this to work, I believe we would need an additional column in the DocumentUserText table. So KEY ‘03’ has VALUE1 ‘text description’ and VALUE2 ‘keynote number’
It seems the DOT command almost has this functionality. In that you can assign ‘secondary text’ to a given numeric value. But there does not seem to be a way to output this secondary text. So if there were a way to output all ‘secondary text’ in a numeric list, this could also serve as a keynote solution. Or better yet, output secondary text for a range of DOT values (1-7 out of 99).
Also along these lines - it would be really great to have bullet point / auto-numbered list formatting as a text option. You can of course type in the numbers manually. But there is no way to indent the body text so that it wraps correctly.
This would be
very beneficial for the
keynotes workflow described above.
I’m surprised to see that no one has brought this up in the forum?
Hello - I can make you a tool to spit out dot secondary text but I do not think that gets at the underlying request, which I am not 100% sure I get…Does AttributeUsertext on objects (SetUserText command) get at what you need?
Thanks for the quick response. Let me try to put the request more simply:
I’d like to have an editable list of numbers and values that can spit out either one of these values as a Text Field. The desired application is to output all or part of this editable list. To be printed on a layout.
Of course this is something that Visual ARQ handles naturally. Becuse doors are single objects, then BIM data of all types can be stored there.
But, in Rhino normally this is handled by userdata. The part that might be missing in this model is where is the data is stored? For instance the would data stored on the tag itself:
Index <> Value
Key# <> Value
Then on another object, perhaps a table of some kind, the Keys and the Notes would be stored.
I am not clear on whether this would be handles by Grasshopper or Python? Is it Rhino 6 or 7?
The Keynote # and the string that contains the note itself could be stored in an external JSON file or Excel or CSV file.
Thanks for the tip re: Visual ARQ - I’ll look into this some more.
An editable table of text fields would be a great way to store these values. Ideally this table could actually be viewed / edited in a layout (printed).
Alternately, these fields could be edited / managed within an Excel file —> CSV ----> Rhino. However, I don’t believe that Rhino can interpret a CSV with more than 2 values per line:
01,keynote value,lengthy text description assigned to keynote value, etc
02,keynote value,lengthy text description assigned to keynote value, etc
