Digital Calculations? 1

[Brad805]

I am taking a course online and have been watching the professor produce very nice notes with a digital pen. This got me to thinking about creating all of my calc's digitally. Given the current pen technology this seems possible. I did find one young engineer in the UK that seems to be doing so (UK ENG). I got tired searching for documents on my Samsung tablet, so for Christmas I bought myself a new Surface Pro 8. I have been testing this idea with Microsoft OneNote and I think with practice it can be done without any extra time. We had a very enlightening discussion about bluebeam not long ago, and I was wondering if anyone else has tried this and if so, what note software have you tried and what did you find?

 

[thejonster]

I do all my calcs on pdf as I go, it's been nice thanks to bluebeam! Instead of using pen for equations I use a combination of pasting Speed crunch calc history, screenshot excel with equations shown using something like this or this, insert pdfs of SMath for steel calcs, sketching details w/ bluebeam as I go and copying snippets, and a LOT of copy and paste from the codes, plans, sketches, and anything else I reference. Calc sets turn out very complete this way.

"Snapshot" in bluebeam is your friend, it's under 'edit', or just press 'g'.

Also Win+H will let you speak to type with windows 10, hopefully better in win 11, this could help speed things up and better document what you're doing.

 

[thejonster]

I loved how nice handwritten ink looked on bluebeam, but it made the pdf files too large very quick! Pens work great on excel to supplement the calculation with sketches.

Question on bluebeam for everyone:
Is there a setting that I can reduce the data used by pen marks? I haven't tried for 5 years or so

 

[EZBuilding]

Could you snapshot your pen marks, paste and then delete your pen marks?

 

[thejonster]

I could, but I'm not a fan of extra steps like that

 

[RFreund]

Wow, I'm glad to see the increased usage of SMath. I used to use a "background image" for a template, but you may want to look into using a header. This will avoid some of the scaling issues you might be having.
Basically, I have a template file that I start every calculation with. I try to take screen captures of software output and put them into SMath. For example, I might define the loading on a beam in SMath on one page and put that info into a steel beam program (say RAMSbeam), then screenshot that result into SMath. I'm using SMath as you would use OneNote. If I need to draw a free body diagram, I would draw it in Whiteboard (or OneNote) and then screenshot it and paste it into SMath. I haven't thought about printing smath and then putting it into OneNote for additional annotation, but I suppose you could.

One more thing to add - Check out XODO for marking up PDF's. It has its fair share of limitations, but it's free and fast. It has an autosave feature which sometimes causes more grief than good, so you might want to turn that off.

 

[Brad805]

RFreund, I have found many of your discussions on the SMath forum. Thanks for the advice.

In SMath we use a background image with fields in the header so each page automatically lists the calc info.

 

[RFreund]

@Brad805 - Nice Work!! Honestly yours looks better than mine.

 

[dik]

I do that often... you can use the Windows snapshot to directly paste into SMath. I often do that off page, so it doesn't print. I also do a lot of cut and paste from other programs.

Rather than think climate change and the corona virus as science, think of it as the wrath of God. Feel any better?

-Dik