[David Cutler]

This might be worth trying @matt-hackman

1. Starting with a grid draw a series of 1 ft horizontal and vertical “sawcut” lines. Maybe start with a 10 X 10 grid

2. Select them all and group them together

3. Add this group as a custom tool

4. Paste this group over your area as needed

5. Select and ungroup your markup

6. Select the pieces that fall outside your cut demo area and delete them.

7. Select all again and group the remaining pieces.

A lot comes down to how accurate you want to be. You could work with 6” long segments or 5 ft. You could also extend or add filler pieces to dial it in.

[David Cutler]

Thank you for the clarifications @Vince

I’ll have to pay more attention to the layers the next time that I combine documents. Most of the PDFs I receive don’t have the native layers available. I wonder if perhaps this is the reason why?

[David Cutler]

Very interesting question @Vince Unfortunately I don’t have much experience with Layers. My initial thought is that it may be as simple as a setting checkbox that indicates “preserve existing layers when combining” buried somewhere in the preferences – though you probably would have found this by now…

A couple of follow up questions:

1. Are you “overlaying” the pages from separate documents or simply adding another 10 pages to an existing document?

2. Are you using “sets”? (If so I’m probably of no use to you as I don’t use them.)

3. If you are using sets do you have the same issue if you simply combine two documents into 1 PDF file?

4. Is part of the issue that the layer names are the same in both documents?

Ready to watch to see what other post and learn from them… 😎🍿

[David Cutler]

That’s a good question @Vince that I’m not sure on how to answer. I’d have to work out how to match the options that I select to the already established item numbers in our estimating software. I expect that this could be done with some sort of lookup table or power query, but frankly I’m not sure where to start with this…

[David Cutler]

Thank you for your suggestions @Doug McLean & @Vince

Being organized with your custom tools is important. I dream of a rolling, multi drawer tool cabinet to keep all my mechanics type tools in. What I have is a 40 year old metal box with everything in it (I know that 3/8″ socket is in there somewhere). My Revu toolbox is somewhere in between. I use custom tool chest (26 at this point) and the majority of my tools have a 4 digit “item” code included in their “subject” column. As long as I take the time to sort new tools into their numerical order when I make them this works pretty well.

A couple of additional features would be helpful in the Tool Chest:

1. Ability to sort by “subject” or “label”

2. Ability to manage the columns in the Tool Chest – I don’t need to see the “Comment” column at this point. I can make it smaller, but I can’t remove it

3. Ability to search for a specific tool

One of these days I will build out the toolset completely to match our items listing for our estimating system (I don’t have item 6090 Water Main – 12″ D.I.P CL52 for example). I’ll switch all of the “perimeter” measurements to “poly-lines” (so that I can use the rise/drop feature) and I’ll get everything organized (think of the foam cutouts that have a spot for every wrench). Until then I’ll do my best to remember where I set that tool down.🙂

[David Cutler]

Interesting question @matt-hackman

Not knowing the shape of what you are looking at I made a quick calc. Starting with a simple 10 ft x 10 ft square (100 SF) cutting 1 boundary edge (say north side and west side) and every 2 feet in both directions you would end up with 100 lf of saw cutting (50 lf north-south, 50 lf east-west). So, in this case, if you measured the square footage it would be a 1 to 1 relationship between square footage and saw cutting. You would need to add an additional boundary cut on one side north south and east west.

[David Cutler]

I may have been too quick to panic. Poked around looking to see if I had any security settings that need to be adjusted, didn’t find any, but I tried the export again and now it seems to be working… Sigh…🤣

[David Cutler]

I haven’t tried using multiple profiles yet @Vince – Now you have me worried that I’d loose the information from my custom columns.

That actually brings to mind a somewhat related question – if you have a tool that uses a custom column, but that column isn’t displayed in your markup list, does the program continue to capture that data? Kinda one of those “if a tree falls in the woods and there isn’t anyone there to see it does it make a sound” questions.🙂

[David Cutler]

I think I may have a work around for you @Vince

I found that I have the same issue with some plot plans that I was working with yesterday. When I combined the 29 sheets the layer structure is there, but the layers only appear to be present on the first page of the PDF – they are grayed out on the other 28 pages.

So I tried this: I opened the 1st and 2nd sheets separately. I then copied the second sheet from the thumbnail view and switched back to the 1st sheet file. On the thumbnail screen I right clicked and pasted the second page into the file. This appears to have preserved the functionality of the layers. This would be a slow process with a project with 100’s of sheets, but it would get it done and preserve the functionality.

If you haven’t already done so I’d suggest reaching out to Bluebeam on this one. You may have found a bug that they haven’t come across yet…

Good luck!

[David Cutler]

Nothing wrong with learning something new by “accident”. Seems as if I’ve heard that that is how vulcanization of rubber was discovered. That’s turned out to be pretty useful over the years….🙂

[David Cutler]

That’s AWSOME @Vince !

Thank you for posting this. I never imagined that you would be able to grab a boundary in that way and copy the boundary. Since the cutout doesn’t have it’s own “properties” I didn’t expect that Revu would see it as a “duplicatable” markup.

Experimenting with this a bit here’s another trick to know. If you fill your cutout with another area markup and then right click on that fill in and change the order so that it is “in the back” your cutout is selectable as you noted above for coping.

[David Cutler]

This might be a good example of where a “trim” feature would be handy to have. Imagine being able to drop your pre-arranged 2×2 grid over an irregular shape and then being able to draw a “trimming line” around the limits of the area to be cut. Could be a huge timesaver!

https://suggestions.bluebeam.com/ideas/new

[David Cutler]

Hope that Monday is treating you better than Friday @troy-degroot !

Do you have a backup system in place for when things like this come up? If not, will you be developing one?

[David Cutler]

Lots of good best practices tucked in that response @troy-degroot

[David Cutler]

Great video @Vince