From the course: Revit 2026: Essential Training for Architects

Linking a PDF - Revit Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2026: Essential Training for Architects

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Linking a PDF

“

- [Instructor] In the last several videos, we've focused on bringing in AutoCAD files to Revit. But Revit supports lots of different file formats. And another very popular file format is PDFs. So in this video, I want to show you how you can bring a PDF into your Revit project. So it starts on the insert tab, just like the CAD files did. And just like CAD files, we can import a PDF or we can link a PDF. And generally speaking, anytime link is an option, I consider that to be more of a best practice over importing. So that's what I'm going to demonstrate here is link PDF. I'm going to select this file. This is my PDF file that's in the chapter five folder. And I will go ahead and open that. And what it does is it displays this little preview window first. And if your PDF file has multiple pages, they will be listed here and you can page through them. But unfortunately in this interface, you can only bring in one page at a time. So if you've got a 10 page PDF and you want to bring in all 10 pages, you're going to have to actually link each page separately. Okay, so that is a little bit of a drag, but in this case, there's only one page. So that makes it easy. We're just going to select that single page there. Now you do want to pay attention to the resolution down here. I think 72 is a little too course in most cases. I think 600 is maybe just a bit too much in most cases. So for most of the PDFs that I work with, 150 to 300 usually gives me pretty good results. Since this is a floor plan, I'm going to choose 300, but you're welcome to choose whatever number makes sense to you. So I'm going to go with 300 there. I'm going to click OK and then it will simply prompt me for where I want to place this. Now I'm going to go ahead and place it roughly in the center here. And the next thing that I want to talk about is this initially comes in not to scale. So Revit just decides how big to make the thing. And if we kind of zoom in here, you know, you remember we were working on this floor plan in an earlier video. I'm just going to use my little tape measure tool here and just kind of take a distance between here and here and you can see that that's almost twice as large as it's supposed to be. So it definitely did not come in to scale. Now, the next thing I want to show you is that PDFs potentially support snapping behavior. Now it depends on the kind of PDF. If you just bring in a text file, it won't have anything to snap to. But if it's a graphical image like this, then snapping might be an option and you can tell if this enables, snaps button is available. So what we're going to do is toggle that on. And now if I go back to my tape measure, notice that it will let me snap very precisely to those points. And now it says 10 feet, which tells me that this thing is probably exactly twice as large as it's supposed to be. Now, I could rely on that number and just scale it down half as much. But since there are some dimensions here in the file, I prefer to use those dimensions as a reference. Okay, so what I'm going to do is select the file and go to the scale tool right here. RE is the shortcut. When you choose the scale tool, over here on the ribbon, you have two options, graphical and numerical. You would choose numerical if you just wanted to scale it half as much, right? So if we wanted to trust that 10 foot dimension that I just measured, we could just say 0.5 there and we could click a point on screen and it would scale it down half as much. I'm going to choose graphical because I'd prefer to use this dimension as a reference. And that dimension is going from this corner of the building to this corner of the building. And then I'll start to move my mouse and notice that temporary dimension that appears. Now we just simply type in the distance that you see on the dimension string. So in the imperial file, I'm going to type in 31 space eight. If you're working in the metric file, put in 9652 millimeters. Either one is fine. Press Enter and it should rescale the file such that now if you take a measurement between here and here, you can see that it's 31 foot eight. You can also see that measurement right there. If I take this measurement here to here, you can see that that's just about five feet. So you can see, we're really close, but that's why I prefer to trust an actual dimension as opposed to what we were getting over here. But if you've got a PDF file that's vector based, then that's the process. You first bring it in and then you scale it based on some known dimension in the file. Otherwise, if the PDF is something that's more of a diagram or an illustration, you can just simply bring it in and scale it manually based on your preference. But that's how you can use PDF files directly in your Revit project. And I should also point out that since we did it as a link, I can go to manage links now and it will be listed and I could reload it, should the original file change in any way.

Contents