Standard practice for electronically marking up shop drawings?
Standard practice for electronically marking up shop drawings?
(OP)
Hi All
I've recently started dabbling with using Bluebeam Link to markup steel and concrete shop drawings electronically, with a view to ultimately seeing how efficient it will be versus printing out hardcopies and marking them up by hand. I want to see if its something that might be worthwhile in considering rolling out Bluebeam to other engineers within the organisation who are interested before committing to the additional cost of more licenses.
I was wondering what practices people use (colours/symbols etc) for making up a shop drawing PDF electronically before returning to the fabricator?
Is there such a thing as a standard practice by an industry body which people typically try to follow. When I typically mark them up by hand I use red pen for changes, blue pen for questions, and sometimes a coloured highlighter to check of items I have reviewed on the general arrangement drawings. However it usually degenerates into a bit of a mix and match depending on what colour pen I have in my hand at the time I discover something that might need correcting!
With Bluebeams control over linetypes and ability to replicate anything at the click of a button, I've been a bit more disciplined in the review process and I can always change it afterwards. Setting up a standard set of tools/stamps etc definitely helps in this respect.
If anyone has a sample marked up PDF to share showing their way of doing things with respect to shop drawing reviews it would be useful, or alternatively if they have a good external resource.
Thanks
I've recently started dabbling with using Bluebeam Link to markup steel and concrete shop drawings electronically, with a view to ultimately seeing how efficient it will be versus printing out hardcopies and marking them up by hand. I want to see if its something that might be worthwhile in considering rolling out Bluebeam to other engineers within the organisation who are interested before committing to the additional cost of more licenses.
I was wondering what practices people use (colours/symbols etc) for making up a shop drawing PDF electronically before returning to the fabricator?
Is there such a thing as a standard practice by an industry body which people typically try to follow. When I typically mark them up by hand I use red pen for changes, blue pen for questions, and sometimes a coloured highlighter to check of items I have reviewed on the general arrangement drawings. However it usually degenerates into a bit of a mix and match depending on what colour pen I have in my hand at the time I discover something that might need correcting!
With Bluebeams control over linetypes and ability to replicate anything at the click of a button, I've been a bit more disciplined in the review process and I can always change it afterwards. Setting up a standard set of tools/stamps etc definitely helps in this respect.
If anyone has a sample marked up PDF to share showing their way of doing things with respect to shop drawing reviews it would be useful, or alternatively if they have a good external resource.
Thanks






RE: Standard practice for electronically marking up shop drawings?
1) RED = correction or addition
2) BLUE = an instruction to the designer/detailer
3) GREEN = item to remove or delete
Dave
Thaidavid
RE: Standard practice for electronically marking up shop drawings?
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.
RE: Standard practice for electronically marking up shop drawings?
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.
RE: Standard practice for electronically marking up shop drawings?
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.
RE: Standard practice for electronically marking up shop drawings?
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 -------".
RE: Standard practice for electronically marking up shop drawings?
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.
RE: Standard practice for electronically marking up shop drawings?
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.