Why didn't I think of this earlier?

This may be obvious to some people, but it only occured to me recently.

I was tagging rooms in colored plans, and my project manager wanted "big" names, but in some cases, big was going to be too big, so I needed different size room tags. In the past I would have simply created a new family, and modified the label properties. This time however I did things a little different. See the image to the right for what my new tag looks like.

Looks slightly confusing huh? What I did was I copied the label and did a paste aligned in the same location. Then I edited the label to be a new type with a new text size. In addition I manipulated the size of the text box so that in some cases I would get two lines instead of one. Once that was done, I then set the visibility control of each label to a parameter.

I could have gotten really fancy from there with setting up some formulas to control different types. But I opted for simplicity (as it was quicker). So I created a new family type for each tag size, and for each type, the correctly sized label is turned on, and all the others are turned off (see the image below).

The other trick I like to do when labeling rooms is to make use of the comments field. Often on "presentation" drawings we want to abbriviate room names (heck on construction docs we do too), or maybe you want to call something by a more general name, then "Math & Sciences classroom", perhaps simply "classroom" is better and easier (and doesn't raise as many questions with clients! :) ). Hence I use the comments field, so that in my room schedule "Janitor Closet" is called just "JC". To do this I duplicate my room tag and change the labels to point to the Comment's Property, rather then "Name". Between my new and improved tags and the two seperate fields, I have a great deal of flexibility when it comes to labeling rooms on drawings.