Line Position for Polylength Takeoff

  • Line Position for Polylength Takeoff

    Posted by Nic Bitting on May 24, 2023 at 10:31 am

    One feature that I enjoyed about Planswift is that when building custom tools for a linear takeoff you could select whether the line would be centered, or aligned left, or aligned right between the two end points you’ve selected.

    I’ve been pecking around but haven’t found a way to replicate this in Bluebeam. Maybe I could upload custom line styles that would allow me to accomplish it. Has anyone played with this?

    Nic Bitting replied 10 months, 3 weeks ago 5 Members · 11 Replies
  • 11 Replies
  • Vince

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    May 24, 2023 at 10:59 am
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    You can fix this in custom line styles and you can probably make a much better markup by including some text as well.

    Below is a line style I created for measuring the masonry in foundations: –

  • Doug McLean

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    May 24, 2023 at 1:56 pm
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    I’m going to second @Vince ‘s comment.

    Create a custom line style. There’s an offset button to do exactly what you want.

    Be careful though, the offset will be determined by which direction you make your markup.

  • Nic Bitting

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    May 25, 2023 at 10:32 am
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    Thanks @Vince and @doug, I’ve not worked with custom line styles yet. Could you point me toward any tutorials I could review on the process?

    • Liz Larsen

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      May 25, 2023 at 1:36 pm
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      Check out Vince’s YouTube channel. He has a couple videos from 3 months ago where he uses some custom line styles to do offsets.

      https://www.youtube.com/@vinicsurveying

      I’ll let the others chime in with any additional resources.

      • Isaac Harned

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        May 26, 2023 at 8:31 am
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        This is awesome, I must have missed the video from Vince. Was wondering myself if this was possible. Rock on!

    • Vince

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      May 26, 2023 at 9:02 am
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      As an extra note on this, if you set up a line style like shown in my picture you can get it to work easily in different scaled drawings e.g. the above was set up to work on a 1:50 scale drawing using a line thickness of 3.

      If you are working on a 1:100 or 1:200 drawing all you need to do is reduce the thickness to say 1.50.

      So, just adjust the line thicknesses of your tools in the actual toolboxes before you start marking up and that’s it.

  • Nic Bitting

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    December 4, 2023 at 12:55 pm
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    Hello all, following up on this thread, I’ve been updating our line styles to allow for center aligned, left aligned and right aligned Polylines.

    One hiccup I’ve run into is that with a center aligned Polyline when the Show Label option is checked the Label sits neatly next to the Takeoff (pic. 1 below). However with a left or right aligned Polyline the Label get’s thrown far from the Takeoff (pic 2 below).

    I’ve tried several different setting to resolve this, but nothing seems to make a difference. Has anyone else found a method to resolve this?

  • Doug McLean

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    December 4, 2023 at 5:41 pm
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    is this a Revu 21 thing? I’m not too sure what you mean when you’re talking about alignment.

    the default in Revu 20 is center and there doesn’t seem to be a way to change it (or am I missing something)

    • Nic Bitting

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      December 5, 2023 at 8:08 am
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      Hey @Doug McLean , it could be a Revu 21 thing. I haven’t played with our custom line styles until, so not sure how this would have played out in Revu 20.

      I’ll try to explain this another way. With the Standard Solid line style, when you pick two points to draw the line, the highlighted portion shows up equally centered on either side of the drawn line (pic one below). As you can see the label then sits neatly with the highlighted Takeoff.

      I’ve recently created custom line styles so that when you pick two points the highlighted portion can show up either to the left or right of the line (pic two below) – This is particularly useful for radius benches, where I want to highlight the full depth of the bench, not just the front edge. In these instances the label is floating really far away from the line.

      Just wondering if anyone has a trick for keeping that label closer to my highlighted Takeoff when I’m using these custom line styles?

      • Vince

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        December 19, 2023 at 1:46 am
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        Has the position of the Label been moved when the right offset tool was created? Can you move it closer and then save the revised tool to your Tool Chest?

        • Nic Bitting

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          December 20, 2023 at 7:20 am
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          Good thought Vince. Indeed the label has moved away. I just tested your hypothesis, and I can move the label, but I can’t get it any closer to the highlighted markup, it only moves further away to either side of the line.

          Seems like an odd glitch. When you offset a line left or right the label gets offset as well – to a disproportionate degree.

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