Monday, January 2, 2012

Just a Leader Only by Itself All Alone

Dave Edwards wrote to me recently to pass along a tip. He's a self professed "font nut" as the owner of TC Fonts so finding a way to use a font to get leaders without seeing text would be more fun than the other techniques like using a really tiny font height or creating a blank symbol family instead.

Here's the essence of the tip:

Revit is smart enough to strip out "blank" characters including the No Break Space and Em/En spaces found in the Unicode character range. However, there's one that will work - Zero-Width Space or U+200B. If you bring up the Character Map system application and Select/Copy this character into the Clipboard, you then create you leader and then Paste this character into the box. Nothing shows.



This solution does depend on the font you use as well as making sure that anyone who will open your project file also has the font installed. That's the classic Achilles heel of using custom fonts in general.

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