Lost,
take a look at Dependent Views and Match Lines. I think this will get you where you want to be. Break Lines really are for wall sections and details, where you want to consolidate a single view by taking out extraneous stuff. Dependent Views and Match Lines let you work in one main view, but sheet multiple dependent views, and also tag each side of the match lines with a smart tag that points to the adjacent view. Sadly Revit falls flat on its face when you also want to show an Overall Plan at reduced scale, but still with smart tags. But for what you describe, I suspect Dependent Views will work well.

Best,
Gordon

So quick a reply, Gordon! I'll look into the dependent views. There will be no match line, as most of the building is not relevant and won't be shown on my early drawings.

I've got a 90' long building with 20' of work at one end and 5' of work at the other end. The concept of the view break looks like the obvious answer to showing the two relevant areas on a sheet without the irrelevant middle portion. Does the view break tool simply not work for plan views?

Hmm, now that you describe it that way, breaking the view might make more sense. It should work fine in plan. Perhaps the key is that you are turning OFF cropping (overlapping corners graphic, tool tip is Do Not Crop View) where what you need to do is simply Hide Crop Region, the icon to the right, corners with a light bulb?

Hmm... Just verified, and it works. But boy does it blow up grid lines in an unpleasant way. I wonder what other surprises lurk in Plan View with Break View? I have never needed to use the tool in plan, so perhaps this is even a known issue. Jeff and Aaron are lurking about this eve, maybe one of them has an explanation, or a suggestion that my grid bubbles are junk.

Gordon

Gordon: Yes, I was trying to apply the view break without cropping the view. It works after cropping the view. The warning message I originally quoted seems a bit off-topic and not well written. I think it should be saying that un-cropping the view will remove the view breaks, not turning the crop region off. I turned the crop region off and back on with no problem.

I have no grids in this very simple project, so I can't corroborate.

Bonus question: I'd like to have three views (existing conditions, demolition plan, proposed plan) with the same crop region and view breaks on three separate 8 1/2 x 11 sheets, and have the plans align from sheet to sheet. Before applying the view break, I aligned the plans by drawing reference planes in the views, drawing a detail line on the sheet from the end of the reference plane, copying and pasting-aligned-to current-view into the other sheets, then moving the other sheets' views from end of reference plane to end of detail line. Is there a way to align view breaks among views? It feels like the crop regions are eyeballed and it's not possible to align them from view to view, much less get the view break exactly the same among them.

Hmm, curiouser and curiouser. When I was turning off cropping, I got the same message, and it did delete the breaks. Whereas just hiding got the look I wanted and I could inside to adjust. You definitely have to crop the view, as breaking the view is really manipulationg the crop. Yeah, lots of lingustic issues like that. Take for example the work set that is "editable", which is really only editable by one person, as compared to the workset that is "not editable" but is really editable by everyone. So hard to change the nomenclature to checked out and not checked out I guess.
So do you have a view doing what you need it to now?

As for alignments, the sad reality is that Revit is an eyeballed world. The newish Guide Grids feature can help a bit, but it doesn't do what I at least really want, which is allow me to align building and view titles consistently between sheets. Reality is, you just eventually give up and eyeball em. I really prefer to do things more intentionally, but there are areas where Revit is just sloppy, and there isn't a real good way around it.
I wonder if Lou Kahn would have just hated Revit with all it's sloppiness?

Gordon

Gordon: I have no comment on the grid guide! However, plan alignment from sheet to sheet is one thing you do not have to eyeball. Follow my instructions above -- I get perfect alignment because the end of the reference plane snaps to the end of the detail line on the sheet; just force the selection of the end points (with keyboard shortcut SN) when picking start and end points of the move.

To get the crop regions as close as possible (but unfortunately still eyeballed) in the past, I thought I'd added reference planes and eyeballed the crop regions to match from view to view using them. So I just tried it and was able to snap a reference line to one, and sadly only one, corner of the crop region (see attached). Not really useful since it won't allow repeated snapping (allowing me to draw a diagonal reference line the exact size of the crop region), but also curiouser and curiouser...

Gordon: I should have waited to reply until I had enough energy to read your post regarding alignments (and not went off on an irrelevant tangent). The eyeballing of view titles, and all annotation, drives me crazy! It's frustrating that the program knows the origin of the view title but just won't share it with us. If I could snap to its origin, I could use the drafting line trick to align them among sheets.

Lost,
Used your method until recently. It's cumbersome, aggravating and costs a LOT of time...
May I suggest this workflow instead:

1. Parent View
2. 2 Scope boxes on both sides of the plan view
3. Create 2 dependant views and apply scope boxes
4. Place on sheet.

Plus side:
- works on multiple phases
- works on multiple levels (that is, all levels you expand the scope box to)
- works on all kinds of views: besides the plan views also on elevations, sections and so on. Try eyeballing all those too, it will make your eye fall out of it's sockets.

Martijn: Thank you for the suggested workflow. Are you talking about my method of getting crop regions as close as possible? I'm trying to figure out Scope Boxes right now; as with everything else, my 2d CAD brain has trouble understanding 3d BIM concepts. I'll try your workflow but don't know what problem I'm trying to resolve!

EDIT: So I've followed your workflow to get two partial plans on one sheet, and it worked for the first sheet with one weird thing happening: one of the dependent views is showing an annotation outside its scope box (see attached). The note is within the bottom partial plan's scope box and shows up correctly there. I checked to make sure the scope box is applied. Is there something else I should check?