Drawing production — sheets, views and drawing types

A model is not a deliverable. What gets issued, checked, priced and built from is a set of drawings, and producing them consistently is where most project time quietly disappears. This guide explains why that happens and how STING attacks it.

Why drawing sets drift

Ask three engineers in the same office to produce a mechanical plan and you will get three drawings. Different scales, different line weights, different text heights, different crop extents, different title block entries, different numbering.

None of them is wrong exactly — each made reasonable choices. But together they read as three firms' work, and every inconsistency is a question the reviewer has to resolve. Worse, the choices are invisible: they live in each view's settings, so nobody can see the standard, only its results.

The usual response is a written standard nobody reads and a template that drifts. The better response is to make the standard something the software applies rather than something people remember.

What a drawing type is

A drawing type is a named bundle that answers every presentation question for one kind of drawing, in one place:

• Sheet identity — paper size, title block family, orientation
• View appearance — scale, detail level, view template
• Cropping — follow a scope box, tighten to the geometry, follow a room boundary, or leave alone, plus the margin to leave
• Naming — the patterns that generate sheet number and sheet name
• Layout — where viewports sit on the sheet
• Annotation — what gets dimensioned and tagged automatically, and with which tag families
• Print appearance — colour scheme, line weight scaling, whether links go halftone

"Architectural plan at 1:100 on A1" becomes a thing with a name that can be applied, audited and corrected — instead of a convention people approximate.

STING ships 93 of these covering architectural, structural, mechanical, electrical, public health, healthcare, coordination, fabrication and client-presentation work. They sit on A1 and A3, at the scales those disciplines actually use.

Text size follows scale

One detail worth calling out because it is so often got wrong by hand: annotation text height is derived from drawing scale, not chosen per view. A drawing at 1:50 gets 2.5 mm text — the ISO default — while 1:100 drops to 2.0 mm and 1:20 rises to 3.5 mm. Text that is legible at one scale is unreadable or overbearing at another, and deriving it removes the judgement call entirely.

Routing — picking the right one automatically

Having 93 drawing types would be worse than useless if someone had to choose correctly every time. Instead a routing table maps discipline + project phase + document kind to a drawing type. There are 118 routing rules, evaluated in order, first match wins.

So an electrical drawing in the presentation phase routes to a presentation type, while the same discipline in the construction phase routes to a production type — same model, different treatment, no decision required.

If nothing matches, STING deliberately does nothing rather than guessing. Your view keeps its existing settings. Silence means "no rule covered this", not "this is correct".

Corporate standard versus project reality

Every practice hits the same tension: there is a house standard, and there is what this particular client demands. STING handles it in layers.

The corporate catalogue is the baseline, and it is integrity-checked — each entry carries a fingerprint, so if a corporate definition is edited, STING notices and reclassifies it as a project-specific entry rather than pretending the house standard still applies. You cannot quietly diverge from the standard and still claim to be on it.

Project-specific drawing types layer on top and win where the identifiers match, and project routing rules are inserted ahead of corporate ones. The house standard on disk is never modified.

Project overrides are stored inside the Revit file itself, so they survive Save As and renaming the project — a common way this kind of configuration gets lost.

View style packs

A catalogue of 93 drawing types does not mean 93 visual styles. Most differ in scale and layout while sharing an appearance, so the graphics — line weights, text and dimension styles, hatching, filters, category overrides, link handling — are factored out into view style packs. STING ships 35, aligned to BS 1192:2007+A2:2016, ISO 13567 and CIBSE discipline colours. Change a pack once and every drawing type using it follows.

ISO 19650 naming

Sheet numbers follow the container naming convention from BS EN ISO 19650-2: project, originator, volume, level, type, role, number, suitability and revision. Suitability is the part teams most often skip and most need — the code saying whether something is work in progress, shared for coordination, or issued for construction. A drawing without it is a drawing whose status is a matter of opinion.

How STING approaches it

Drawing work lives on the DOCS tab. It is a dense tab; these are the parts you will actually use.

Laying out sheets

The alignment row works on a viewport selection — ↑Top, ↕MidY, ↓Bot, ←Left, ↔MidX — and L→R and T→B distribute them evenly. Grid Align snaps viewport centres to a grid, and Align Edges and Distribute handle the rest.

For a whole sheet, Auto-Layout arranges viewports in rows, and MaxRects uses a denser packing strategy that fits more onto the same paper. Both work out the usable area from the title block rather than assuming it, so a non-standard title block does not break the layout.

Optimal Scale answers "what scale will actually fit" by comparing view extents to the available area and rounding to a standard scale — up, never down, so nothing gets clipped.

Numbering

+1 and -1 shift a run of sheet numbers to make room for an inserted drawing, and Prefix and Suffix change a shared part across a set. Renumber handles the whole set in two passes, which avoids the collisions you get renaming sheets one at a time.

Producing and checking

Produce Per Level and Produce Sections generate drawings from the routing rules rather than one at a time. Inspect shows which drawing type a view resolved to — the first thing to check when a drawing does not look how you expected. Doctor and Heal TBs repair drift, and Sync Styles pushes style changes back through the views that use them.

ISO Check audits the sheet set against ten naming and completeness rules: empty or duplicated numbers and names, numbers that do not begin with a discipline letter or contain no sequence, spaces where hyphens belong, missing title blocks, sheets with no viewports, all-lowercase names, and characters that will break file export. It reports a compliance percentage and the worst offenders. Register exports the full sheet register.

A sensible order of work

1. Inspect a representative view and confirm it resolves to the drawing type you expect.
2. If it does not, fix the routing rather than the individual view.
3. Produce Per Level for the bulk of the set.
4. Auto-Layout or MaxRects, then tidy with the alignment buttons.
5. ISO Check, and clear what it raises.
6. Register for the drawing register, then issue.

The habit that pays off is fixing the rule instead of the drawing. Correcting one view takes a minute and lasts until the next revision; correcting the drawing type fixes every drawing that will ever route to it.