Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Dept. of Reviteristics - Component or Loadable

For many years now Revit families have been called Components. The 2010 and 2011 release help documentation calls them Loadable families. I don't remember if 2009 started calling them this or not.


The ribbon offers us the Component tool however.


I see how loadable is more descriptive of how we get them into a project. I find it interesting that we have to think of them as components when we want to place them but as loadable when we need to design them and add them to a project. I suppose it isn't that hard to blur the distinction.

Language is fun!

3 comments:

Valkin said...

Maybe I'm stuck in my ways but I much prefer the term component over loadable. Isn't cut and paste a way to load the family or even transferring project standards a way to load the family in.

Unknown said...

You are entering the rabbit hole. : )

The thinking was the Component command is a tool that places an instance of a loadable family or creates an in-place family instance.

The more you look into it the more you will see the possibilities. Do you load a component or a family? At one point we considered calling the "Component" tool "Family" but it does not place all the types of families that exist.

As the previous comment notes the creation methods are many. The help changes occurred in 2010 and were an effort to help make it more clear what the different behaviors were. Yes language is fun.

Paul F. Aubin said...

Now you are in my world Steve... Always trying to keep up with and rationalize the new terminology.

I still can't decide if I like the new term "loadable" or not, but when I teach a Families class, I tend to refer to these as "Loadable Component Families" just to cover all bases.... :-)