What Technology Do you Use to Review Drawings Electronically? 25

[Logan82]

Hi!

I find that reviewing PDF drawings of my peers on the computer with Adobe Acrobat is slower or more clunky than just printing the drawing on a 11"x17" paper and reviewing it with a pen and highlighter. For instance, to write a weld symbol on Adobe Acrobat implies to put several lines and perform many mouse clicks, while drawing a weld symbol by hand is very quick. I also feel that printing the drawing enables me to see in a new perspective that makes me see some details that I would not have seen otherwise.

I was wondering if some of you annotate drawings with an electronic pen and a tablet? If so, what do you use?

 

[Brad805]

Koot, yes it was the S7. I find that pen is quite nice for our type of work. Sadly, most of the time I find my self creating simplistic doodles in bluebeam or pasting snips to markup to save a couple of steps.

 

[e95kwon]

I recommend the easycanvas app for ipads. This allows me to mirror the computer display to my ipad and with an apple pen+bluebeam, I can sketch and create calculations by hand with all of functionality of bluebeam (i.e. hold shift for straight lines)

 

[Ron247]

Here is some recent input about Adobe vs BLuebeam vs PDF Element. I have all 3. The work I do for one company, I always at least look at with Adobe because that is all they use. I have a set of 71 pdf drawings their client gave them that was "bound together". It would blow up in Adobe and PDF Element. Bluebeam handled it no problems. ADobe and PDF were real slow and eventually tell me "Not Responding". Whatever is wrong with the file, bluebeam could handle, the other could not.

 

[RWW0002]

@Ron - That is odd, my experience is the exact opposite. I have Adobe Acrobat DC 2015 and Bluebeam Revu 2018, and although I like the functions and abilities of Bluebeam, it is very slow for large pdfs with multiple pages (this seems to be a recent thing - like last 6 months or so I have noticed it). For large bound drawings (think owner-scanned existing drawing sets) each page takes forever to load and the file locks up frequently I thought it might be my system or the pdf's themselves until I opened some in Adobe and I could fly thought the pages..

 

[dold]

+1 for bluebeam. It is literally my portal to the outside world since I work remote. I use bluebeam studio sessions (essentially cloud based 'live' PDFs - someone mentioned that before) to do all of my redlines. If there is one thing I abhor, it is marking up a pdf, saving it somewhere on the server, sending the drafter a link, they turn red to black, make a new pdf, save it....somewhere, I hunt it down, backcheck, redlines again, etc., then, lose track of the pdf, or accidentally overwrite it or whatever other friday morning headache appears. With the session, there's just one pdf, always in the same place, and you can kindof check in on progress (see what's been highlighted/drafted and what i still have time to change). And you'll never lose unsaved changes.

I was 100% pen and paper before I went to work at a much larger office (~70 eng+drafters). That place was 100% bluebeam, even before the pandemic started. In a bigger office, and especially on bigger projects when there are 5+ engineers and 5+ drafters all working at the same time on the same set of drawings, I cannot imagine trying to keep track of markups without bluebeam studio. There was a fairly well developed workflow and markup protocol that everyone uses which is key to keeping everything organized. You can also click on any markup and see who the author is. And filtering markups is very nice.

The toolbox/toolsets can be quite powerful if you take some time to get things set up properly. I have a bunch of toolsets that I curate and keep on the server so that anybody in the office can map them to their toolchest and have access to a library of up-to-date drawing components and office standard markup/progress/backcheck tools. By drawing components, I mean things like weld symbols, bar joist profiles, steel shapes, wood simpson clips and TSN clips, fasteners, section cuts, etc etc etc. For example, it took about 30 seconds to click around and cobble together this poorly conceived detail below. Literally dragging and dropping stuff from a toolchest into the pdf. And if the drafter is a pro, I don't even have to annotate the detail except for some unique part, because the drafter pretty much knows what everything is to begin with and just puts the standardized annotations to each component. Or if you're really fancy, you can name each of the components so the drafter can click on it and there will be a description, which they can just turn into the annotation. A lot of my tools are reproductions of company standard autocad blocks. You can also create custom linetypes and hatches, or import hatches from autocad.

My life would be significantly harder without bluebeam.

Someone mentioned about linking bluebeam to excel. You can do it, but there is pretty limited functionality. It's more geared towards quantity takeoffs and that sort of thing.

And with bluebeam revu extreme, there are scripting (java script) capabilities. We've never used it much, but someone wrote a script for generating locked shop drawing stamps from a dialog. I don't have extreme, but it would be nice to have to write up a couple macros.

Edit for

Bluebeam, it is very slow for large pdfs with multiple pages (this seems to be a recent thing - like last 6 months or so I have noticed it). For large bound drawings (think owner-scanned existing drawing sets) each page takes forever to load and the file locks up frequently I thought it might be my system or the pdf's themselves until I opened some in Adobe and I could fly thought the pages..

If you open that very large pdf and save-as/export as .jpg or .png or .tiff (i can't remember), then go to that file location and convert all of those image files back to a pdf, some sort of magic happens that compresses the file and vastly speeds up page load times. You can also tinker with some of the rendering settings (hardware vs software rendering) which can make a big difference.

 

[Celt83]

@RWW0002
Bluebeam 2018 is a fundamentally broken product, complain to your reseller or Bluebeam that they sold you a broken product and see if they won't give you a significant discount to upgrade. We had a call with our reseller and Bluebeam where the Bluebeam rep basically admitted the code base for 2018 was garbage and they needed to rewrite the rendering engine for 2019. We would be in the middle of meetings and have PDF's just stop rendering content and only show white pages.

My Personal Open Source Structural Applications:

https://github.com/buddyd16/Structural-Engineering

Open Source Structural GitHub Group:

https://github.com/open-struct-engineer

 

[Celt83]

If you open that very large pdf and save-as/export as .jpg or .png or .tiff (i can't remember), then go to that file location and convert all of those image files back to a pdf, some sort of magic happens that compresses the file and vastly speeds up page load times. You can also tinker with some of the rendering settings (hardware vs software rendering) which can make a big difference.

PDF's generated from AutoCAD will have the lines intact as vector elements and hatches turned into individual vectorized lines, this can be a huge performance killer with lots of hatches. When you are exporting to an image file you are forcing a rasterization of the lines so they are no longer saved as vectors with coordinate data but converted to "dumb" image pixels.

My Personal Open Source Structural Applications:

https://github.com/buddyd16/Structural-Engineering

Open Source Structural GitHub Group:

https://github.com/open-struct-engineer

 

[dold]

@Celt
That .pdf>.jpg>.pdf trick is mostly in regards to scanned in drawings. Like existing drawings, etc. that are effectively image files to start with.

Very large 'new' drawings are as you describe. I've found that 'print quality' settings in your cad/revit can make a big difference there. Sometimes...sometimes...reducing file size and flattening helps a little bit. If it's really bogged down I usually turn off anti aliasing, etc and tinker with other settings. Or just suffer...

 

[RWW0002]

Thanks dold. I will look into both the upgrade and the workaround.

 

[Brad805]

Revit has led to huge files. So many leave their dpi settings at 1200dpi or greater. What used to be well under 1Mb is now 15Mb or more per file.

 

[phamENG]

My XP-Pen Artist 12 Pro arrived today. It's a nice piece of hardware for $220 (USD). Not exactly plug and play - configuring the drivers was a bit of a hassle. It also wreaked havoc with my graphics settings. I'm pushing two 27" HD monitors with my laptop already, so adding the third external display was a bit much. Got them split between the dedicated GPU and integral graphics and tweaked the refresh rates to get everything balanced. Now it looks good and works. So I guess I should say it's a nice piece of hardware for $220 plus 2 billable hours.

Works with Bluebeam easily. I programed the buttons to select common markup tools and the wheel to zoom. Pen button to switch between pen tool and pan view. I've only been using it for a couple hours, but I'm very impressed and very pleased thus far. This might actually get me to "paper free." Until I need to print something, anyway...

This wasn't my thread, but thanks for the advice on this anyway.

 

[Ingenuity]

My XP-Pen Artist 12 Pro arrived today.

phamENG: You have had your XP-PEN for near a month now. How do you like it?

I am asking with respect to use with Bluebeam Revu for markups.

I notice there is holiday pricing now for the Artist 24 PRO model (and others) that I may proceed with if it works well for Bluebeam. I am no artist, so maybe it is overkill for my simple applications.

Thanks.


OP - Sorry to hijack your thread.

 

[phamENG]

See attached for a few random markups.

I like it. And Microsoft just updated their Whiteboard app, so I use it as my desktop pad of paper now, too. The programmable buttons are great. I have them set up for Bluebeam so I can automatically select the pen, eraser, etc. The pen itself has two buttons on the side. The placement is convenient for clicking - a little too convenient. You have to make sure you have it sitting in your hand correctly or you'll click it while you're writing.

milkshakelake mentioned the holiday pricing in another thread...too bad for me. Though my desk probably isn't big enough for a pen display that big yet. The 12 pro has a writing area slightly smaller than an 8.5x11 sheet of paper. About 10.5"x5.75"

 

[jayrod12]

Loved your note at the bottom.

I'm extremely happy my college program, even in the mid 2000's, made us do hand drafting and lettering. My writing used to be worse than a doctor's. Now it's at least legible to most.

 

[phamENG]

Thanks. Mine can be pretty rough. The Navy taught me to write in all caps, and I've been doing that for a long time. I'm trying to retrain myself to use lower case because my son's kindergarten teacher wasn't liking his resistance to using them and I thought I should give him a better example. Of course it turns into some strange hybrid between print and cursive that nobody can read. Took me 3 years to teach the draftsmen at my first firm to read my markups...

Something I forgot to mention that's less good: ever since setting it up and installing the drivers, my computer doesn't run as well in some unimportant ways. My dock doesn't behave the way it should - the power button no longer controls the laptop and occasionally it won't even power on unless I unplug the dock first. I couldn't get it to work at all at first but discovered that for some reason my dock (I run a Dell laptop and dock) is routing my dual display to the integrated graphics rather than my dedicated NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650. The integrated graphics is only capable of running 2 external displays, so trying to piggyback the pen display screwed the whole thing up. My final solution was to keep the main monitors on the dock run by my integrated graphics and plug the pen display directly into the HDMI port on the laptop and run it on the dedicated GPU. It makes my laptop dock a lot less convenient, but it works well enough. If anyone knows how to make the dock monitors run on the dedicated that would be nice...

 

[dhengr]

Logan82:
We got a bunch of CAD monkeys and young engineers who do this. The electronic part is the extension cord we stuff up their butt each morning. If they aren’t working, we just flip the switch for a second or two, and they go right back to work. They have an incentive program too, their voltage is set as a function of how many errors they made on the last job.

 

[Ingenuity]

Thanks phamENG. I was going to ask a follow up question on the use of the XP-Pen as a additional screen option, so thanks for the heads up.

I began my career in an era when manual drafting boards were still common and CAD was just beginning - all engineers were required to do basic manual drafting of their first few projects (with a senior drafter mentoring), and as a left-hander using ink on vellum was 'fun'. Fortunately I became an early user of CAD, partly because of my horrific handwriting.

 

[Celt83]

phamENG:

You need to pump that line weight up, I usually don't go below 5 for the line-weight on the pen in Bluebeam (at a 300 dpi print resolution that gives you nearly a 0.5mm line), they do some really aggressive smoothing after the fact as well so I found more deliberate strokes give better results. If things get too jaggy you can try reducing the "pen commitment interval" to around 200 ms (Preferences --> Window --> Tablet)

For your performance issue are you driving the XpPen tablet with power over USB from your laptop, have seen the power draw on these be too high for the USB bus on occasion and cause issues. For the graphics card issue I believe the GTX 1650 can only drive 3 monitors max so if you have two externals + the laptop display and then hookup the XpPen it will kick to the integrated graphics, try disconnecting one of the external monitors (assuming you do have two of them).

Ingenuity:
Also started out manual drafting and a lefty as well. I still find myself twisting the tablet pen as I draw.

My Personal Open Source Structural Applications:

https://github.com/buddyd16/Structural-Engineering

Open Source Structural GitHub Group:

https://github.com/open-struct-engineer

 

[Ingenuity]

Also started out manual drafting and a lefty as well. I still find myself twisting the tablet pen as I draw.

Celt83 I know I will do the same with a tablet. I remember getting in contorted positions when drafting on a drawing board.

What tablet/pen brand do you use with PDF markups?

 

[Celt83]

I mainly use a Wacom Intous 4 at work which I've carried around with me for a long time, a Huion H640P at home, and a first generation surface pro at meetings but the battery is reaching its EOL so have been researching a replacement and the rough 3D scanning capability of the iPad pro with the Lidar sensor may have me sold.

I had an old Wacom 12" pen display that I got off shopgoodwill.com for awhile but the cable broke and the cost for a new pen display device was always prohibitive, these new XpPen and Huion pen displays are tempting me again though and have a few artist friends that have adopted them over the more expensive Wacom equivalents with few to no complaints.

My Personal Open Source Structural Applications:

https://github.com/buddyd16/Structural-Engineering

Open Source Structural GitHub Group:

https://github.com/open-struct-engineer