[Ken Bolen]

You are going to be greatly disappointed in the Bluebeam JavaScript capability with Markups… basically nonexistent. I have spent many hours online searching this over the past year. I have been thru their Tech. Support and visited their booth at a Trade Show in Charlotte a couple months ago. The only real use of JavaScript I have found in Bluebeam is with Forms. The only “API” they publish is for their Studio app (cloud tracking who has seen/modified a file). If someone out there has had better luck, please share your findings.

[Isaac Harned]

Yeah unfortunately I have gone through all of the same documentation I think. Was slightly hopeful, but figured I would more than likely be disappointed for now.

[Isaac Harned]

BTW here is the actual API from one of their Support guys

Bluebeam-JavaScript-API-supported-commands.xlsx 31 KB Excel Spreadsheet - Click to view

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[Ken Bolen]

Impressive, you got the actual Excel file. All I ever found was a JPG on Reddit somewhere. Did you notice what comes back what you search Annot, just the Sync function.

[Isaac Harned]

Yeah I saw that, but that just scans all, why in the world would that be available, but getAnnots is not?

[Alex S]

Can the API at least register the existence of markups? Thread hijacking a bit here, but: I’m seeking some way to count and log them for a given PDF in Revu. Are the API’s capabilities so limited that this isn’t possible?

[David Cutler]

Welcome to the Brainery @as_mii

I can’t speak to the API as I’ve never explored that feature.

To help us better understand your use case could you provide some additional information?

What is the end result that you are looking for? Number of text boxes? Number of highlights? Number of measurements?

Keep in mind that “count” type markups, depending upon how they are used, could show as 1 markup with a count of 20 items, or as 20 markups with a count of 1 per markup.

I’m sure that we could come up with a solution that would export the markups list to a .CSV and then slice and dice the data contained in the markups list – if it will help you achieve your intended outcome.

[Isaac Harned]

I would agree here, plenty you can do with a CSV file, but without the getAnnots method, your scripts will never even see the markups.

[Alex S]

I can’t speak to the API as I’ve never explored that feature.

I may be conflating “API” with available JavaScript methods and/or scripting routines. Aiming to break down that terminology & vocabulary barrier and ask clearer questions ASAP.

What is the end result that you are looking for? Number of text boxes? Number of highlights? Number of measurements?

All of the above whose main color is red. Such annotations could be broadly categorized as “redlines” (believe this is a common term but let me know if unclear), which are what I want to quantify per-page per-PDF.

Keep in mind that “count” type markups, depending upon how they are used, could show as 1 markup with a count of 20 items, or as 20 markups with a count of 1 per markup.

Fortunately, no such markups are used. All are basic PDF annotations for communicating modification of content. Each could/should be tallied singly.

I’m sure that we could come up with a solution that would export the markups list to a .CSV and then slice and dice the data contained in the markups list – if it will help you achieve your intended outcome.

Appreciate the offer and willingness to assist.

Desired/intended outcome: quantity of markups per sheet name/label prefix, per PDF.

Context for clarity: each sheet’s name/label is codified as [single-letter][three numbers], e.g. “A001”. My goal is to track the number of annotations across the sheets of each single-letter category. These might be represented as separate variables for discrete counts in code.

const typeA = 0;
const typeB = 0;
...

Was hoping to achieve this with a single button press that just logs/prints said quantities (to console, popup dialog, etc.).

Quantities
A: 11
B: 14
...
Report End

Should exporting to and processing a .csv be the only way forward, so be it — I can work with that.

[David Cutler]

A few follow up questions for you @as_mii

– How many sheets are you working with? Guessing that it must be a large number if you are looking to automate the count.

– How often do you need to update the data?

– How many sets of PDFs are you monitoring this data on?

I took a quick look at the markup list on my current takeoff. If you click on the top of the “page” column Revu sorts the markups by the page name and provides a total count of markups on each page.

If you are only looking a small number of pages from time to time this may get you what you are looking for.

If you are working with thousands of pages on hundreds of drawing sets daily this would be cumbersome at best.

[Doug McLean]

that’s what Power Query is for