Standard practice for electronically marking up shop drawings?

I don't know whether or not this is a "standard" anywhere, but our company uses the following markup code for plans reviews -

1) RED = correction or addition

2) BLUE = an instruction to the designer/detailer

3) GREEN = item to remove or delete

Dave

Thaidavid

Somewhat related: an Engineer hated reviewing shop drawings. Avoided it by claiming to be color blind. This was before computers and architectural layers based on colors.

I do reviews in ACAD so I can easily change the color when I can't decide if I'm making a red correction or a blue nasty note to the submitter. I pop in a block with yellow background (see through) shading over items I have checked.

I generally use the same colour scheme as David. On some projects, our clients dictate different colours to be used by various consultants. We also use canned stamps, often repeated notes, and weld symbols etc as palette tools. Where sketches need to be included, I'll use content cut and paste to lift the information from other drawings or my own, scanned hand sketches. Another useful feature is that I can have a junior do the first pass and then edit things later without making a big mess of things.

I think that Bluebeam, or sonething like it, is almost indispensable for shop drawing review. Big thumbs up from me.

I like to debate structural engineering theory -- a lot. If I challenge you on something, know that I'm doing so because I respect your opinion enough to either change it or adopt it.

Can any of you guys post a screen shot or pdf of your typical example markups, canned stamps/notes you might use, etc, and what tools you have defined in your tool chest in bluebeam. Mainly to give us an idea of how you've implemented it, for example what you've found works for you.

KootK, I can definitely see with the tool chest you can get some good standard tools setup which saves a lot of legwork and making repetitive notes on multiple occasions on different sheets. The point on having a junior engineer do the first pass and then others review further and tweak the comments and markups is a good advantage I had not considered. My hand reviews degenerate into a mess sometimes, start out writing a comment and run out of room, etc.

The end result with bluebeam looks more professional as well and hopefully removes some of the ambiguity that might occur with messy hand markups. It's just a matter of practice in getting used to it.

I'm not aware of any industry standard; from my experience it's on a project by project basis. Paperless has been the what we've been doing for several years. Sometimes the drawings are exchanged by e-mail, which isn't always the best way. On two recently completed projects we used Projectwise & SharePoint. On a current project, we're using Primavera Contract Manager to exchange documents. It's a very good system.

Typically I just mark up PDF's in red. If I have a comment or instructions I use a text box and say "Note to -------".

The only real frustration that I've had with Bluebeam is that I can't make it precision draw as easily as, say, AutoCAD. This might be just me though. The youngsters can make sketches that could pass for drafted details somehow.

I like to debate structural engineering theory -- a lot. If I challenge you on something, know that I'm doing so because I respect your opinion enough to either change it or adopt it.

Yeah it could do with some more advanced drawing tools. The 'sketch to scale' works, but far from being anywhere equivalent to Autocad-like in terms of speed.

One major annoyance I have noted is when you add a stamp from the stamps menu, if you drag out the extent its insertion point is the top left, but if you add the same stamp to the tool chest, its insertion point is the bottom left. If you just click to place it on the page, its insertion point is central. Really annoying if your stamp includes an arrow and you really want the tip of the arrow to be the insertion point (like for a weld symbol).

I've been playing today and with some simple JavaScript (I say simple because its only a single line, but it took me ages to get it to work as not familiar with JavaScript at all!) and a form textbox you can insert a complete weld symbol as a stamp and get it to prompt you for the weld size, and any other notes for the weld. (See attached file as an example if anyone is interested, just place in your stamps directory, or import as a stamp).

Has anyone else done anything similar with JavaScript to make markup tools more dynamic? I would imagine if I could figure out how to make it a dropdown box in a similar manner I could produce some really efficient markup tools (probably beyond my JavaScript skills at present!).

I also like that you can assign a layer to the tools you save/add to the tool chest, this is really handy if you use a preset number of tools with predefined layers. When you flatten it to send, the layers are retained, and in the resulting PDF you can turn on/off individual layers which is handy for de-cluttering the PDF (The fabricator can concentrate on just the red markups for example, and turn off all of the markups/highlighting of stuff you checked as correct).

The hyperlink batch tool is also worth its weight in gold, having a PDF set which you can click on a detail reference and have it open up the corresponding drawing is really handy.