Read breakthroughs, then some actual magic

[BIM4GIB]

Hi all,

First of all, a big thanks and congrats to @DrunkOnJava for this repo and how it inspired me to believe in the "impossible".
OK so this past Monday I came across a post on LinkedIn that took me to Jakob Hirn's demo website for RVTReader (https://hirn.consulting/rvtreader). Before that I had no idea about this repo and thought that all this kind of research and work was something that only the likes of ODA would indulge in.
So long story short, I’ve been building a separate local prototype for deeper Revit inspection and interoperability experiments. It currently covers family extraction, version-compatibility experiments, geometry recovery, and controlled model-editing tests.

I’m keeping implementation details and non-public test material private while I validate the results. Once I’ve separated generally useful observations from product-specific work, I may contribute a small synthetic fixture, regression test, or bounded format finding upstream.

[DrunkOnJava]

Hi, and welcome. Thank you for the kind words, and sorry this sat for a few days without a reply. It's good to hear the repository made the "impossible" look reachable; the screenshot shows you've gone a long way with it already.

Keeping private material private until you've validated it is the right call. It is also how contributions here have to work: rvt-rs can only take knowledge derived from public byte observations, exported API symbol names, prior public reverse-engineering and buildingSMART specifications, each measured against Revit's own export of the same file (see CLEANROOM.md). Model-editing experiments in particular sit outside what the crate supports today. Its write path copies an OLE file byte for byte and patches streams, and field-level edits are deliberately gated.

If you do get to something you can share, these shapes are easiest for us to check and credit:

• A bounded format fact with its evidence: file hash, stream, byte offset, the bytes and the value you read. Steffen's test-vector pack in #112 is a good model.
• A small model you can release under MIT or CC0, ideally with Revit's own IFC export. docs/reference-models.md lists five tiny recipes that would each settle an open question (hip and gable roofs, wall joins, rooms, openings).
• Where you can't share a file, the output of rvt-inspect --json and rvt-ifc --diagnostics on it (paths redacted) still helps.

Either way, thanks for saying hello, and I'm glad the work was useful.