I often hear people say that Revit doesn’t do drafting…this of course is not the case. Revit does have drafting tools; however, the drafting process is a bit different than those of you coming from AutoCAD are accustomed to. To make the transition to drafting in Revit a bit more comfortable I have outlined below some items that should make the transition a bit easier.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to have your template in place before you start using Revit as your source of generating production drawings. Having your fill patterns (hatch), filled regions, line patterns and line styles created and ready to use will make drafting easier and it will also maintain standards between projects. Pre-loading and building the most common detail components and repeating details will also assist in this process.
All drafting items will be located on the Annotation tab, however many of them are created on the Manage tab under Additional Settings.

So let’s take a look at the differences, and similarities in drafting between Revit and AutoCAD.
Line styles in Revit could be looked at as the equivalent of layers in AutoCAD. In the line style in Revit you define a color, pen weight and pattern to assign to it. When you go to draw a line, you specify a line style from the type selector rather than specifying a layer as you would in AutoCAD.
Line patterns are created inside of Revit, which means it isn’t something I can load from a .lin file like I would in AutoCAD. The line patterns are a series of dashes, dots and spaces. One thing to be aware of in Revit is that we cannot have letters or symbols in a line style, so if you have some line types in AutoCAD that utilize this type of line we will have to go about this differently in Revit.
Fill Patterns can be created in two ways, one by creating a simple pattern, or by accessing a .pat file. Depending on which template you start with there are a small number of predefined fill patterns to choose from for either a drafting pattern or a model pattern. Drafting patterns represent materials in symbolic form, which means it looks the same no matter what scale you are at. Model patterns are an actual representation, which means they remain their actual size no matter what scale you switch to. Additionally, model patterns can be rotated, moved or aligned and dimensioned to.
You can create a model pattern from any drafting pattern by adding the following line of text to the file between the pattern name and the first line of numbers. I usually do a save as and append the pattern name with _mdl
*fillname, fill description
;%TYPE=MODEL
0,0,0,0
More information about drafting and model patterns can be found in the Revit wiki:
Detail components are the equivalent of 2d blocks in AutoCAD. They are a view specific orientation of an object; so for example, you would have three different detail components to represent a piece of dimensional lumber: a section view, plan view and elevation view. Even though these are 2d elements, most are still parametric, meaning that you can build one item and it can be many different sizes.
In the screen shot below you can see what is available from the detail components folder in the Wood Framing folder

Repeating Details are detail components that are arrayed parametrically. These are also a system family, so to generate additional types you will need to edit and duplicate an existing one and modify accocrdingly. Repeating details are used for things that have a set pattern like CMU or metal deck. To create the new pattern, specify the detail component you want to use and modify the parameters as needed. Below is an example of the type properties of a repeating detail. Repeating details are for strait line segments only.

General recommendations:
- Name your line styles and line patterns in a fashion that is descriptive enough to be recognizable to the users. When I create templates for clients that have an established naming convention, I recreate it in Revit.
- Create a drafting view with all of the line styles on it and their names so they have something to reference while they are getting used to Revit.
- Keep all custom content in a separate folder from the out of the box content.
- Organize content folders in a similar fashion to the out of the box content, but add more sub folders if needed to make it easier to find items.
- My one deviation from this might be the detail component folder if you are not familiar with CSI formatting
Words of Wisdom:
Drafting in Revit is not any more difficult that it is in AutoCAD, the difference is having an understanding of how the tools work in Revit, and knowing where to find the content.