VW viewer-redline feature

[Peter Eichel]

Can the redline feature be enabled in VW12 viewer? I do contract work for engineers and designers who, as luck would have it, almost always use AutoCAD, never Vectorworks. The plan is to email a preliminary VW drawing which they could open with the viewer and communicate the changes to myself with the redline tool. I now have a revision record and they cannot accidentally "mess up" my drawing. This arrangement is fine with my clients as long as the final drawing is in the format they want.

VW12 designer/XP home

[islandmon]

Have you considered the publishing solution offered by Acrobat ? ... send PDF's and they can be password protected with various security/edit features enabled. Clients can read them and edit and post notes and place links and Acrobat keeps track of the changes no matter how many times you send the file back&forth.

[Peter Eichel]

EJ-I have a PDF converter(not by Acrobat)I use for single sheets on smaller drawings. One advantage is the small file size for clients still using dial-up and VW's files are very large indeed. It is, however, for viewing only. Regarding your suggestion, do you know if Acrobat can duplicate what the VW viewer does, namely, contain all of the sheets and views in one PDF file? I want to be able to forward the entire drawing as one file, not create and forward each and every sheet from a single drawing as a separate file. The VW viewer with the redline tool would accomplish this at no cost. If anyone from Nemetschek is reading this, getting firms to use your viewer is getting your foot in the door.

[Ramon PG]

quote:

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Originally posted by islandmon:

.... Clients can read them and edit and post notes and place links and Acrobat keeps track of the changes no matter how many times you send the file back&forth.

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Haven't looked into Acrobat mainly because of its ridiculous price, but can people with just Acrobat Reader make comments? Or does everyone in the "info-network" have to buy Acrobat?

[islandmon]

Publishing relies on Acrobat Pro at both ends. It is a very powerful app. and well worth the investment. Acrobat also allows for compiling of PDF files and links within them including movies, too. I've used it since v1. Never do I send huge native VW files for obvious proprietary reasons. CAD = programming whereas Client review = publishing. Acrobat PDF is the only reliable and secure option I know of.

If you need to share dynamic VW files with other VW Users, then it's best to use Work Group Referencing.

Acrobat Reader does not allow for dynamic editing of notations , etc.

[alanmac]

PDF is a route I've taken for some time in providing file images to clients but never using Adobes full product - for my needs the additional facilities and features are not worth the much higher cost.

I use pdf995 with its suite of products on my Windows machine and the built in OSX pdf creator on my work G5, with pdflab to merge pdf's into one.

I've never had the requirement for clients to open the pdf to add notations but in the interests of possible future use I did a quick search.

For Windows users this may be a solution

http://www.visagesoft.com/products/pdfreader/

although I've not tried it yet myself.

For Mac users I have not found anything yet but if your on a Mac creating the pdfs the priority, the receiver may well be Windows based, and you mentioned Autocad so I guess they are, which means the above will work.

Whilst its not what you wish for, as in VW Viewer having redlining facility, it may be a reasonable workaround. Because its those four magical words it may persuade your client to go with it ...FREE

In my opinion you are never going to persuade a client to stump up the money for and use Adobes Distiller to communicate changes they want to your work.

Alan

[Travis]

Peter,

You could, of course, export the sheets as .dwg files; wait for them to come back with notations; open them in a new, clean file; look at and infer the notations into the master file. DON'T import .dwg files into a working file.

But, I'd check to see if your clients don't perhaps already have Adobe Acrobat Pro (v7 is the present revision). If they're invested in ACad, they may have Acrobat. Around here, it's so common that many of our design/engineering consultants have a Print-to-PDf (using Acrobat) button right on their ACad toolbar. We frequently use this method of cross-office "redlining" and I've often seen .pdf files from other firms with in-process notes

I'm with Armstrong on this one. Acrobat, I think, is probably the most reliable, cleanest way to share sheets and allow others to do mark-ups. . .at least electronically.

To extend this idea a bit further: In house, we always prepare each published set of drawings as a .pdf "Book" complete with hyperlinked page tabs. Once you know the workflow, takes about 15 extra minutes to compile. Recently, on a project for the University, they required the as-builts in .pdf format with all drawing references "hot-linked" to the appropriate detail/elevation sheet. (ie, you click on a detail reference marker and jump to the detail.) Took my assistant less than two hours using Acrobat.

Good luck,

[Kevin]

quote:

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Originally posted by Travis:

...To extend this idea a bit further: In house, we always prepare each published set of drawings as a .pdf "Book" complete with hyperlinked page tabs. Once you know the workflow, takes about 15 extra minutes to compile. Recently, on a project for the University, they required the as-builts in .pdf format with all drawing references "hot-linked" to the appropriate detail/elevation sheet. (ie, you click on a detail reference marker and jump to the detail.) Took my assistant less than two hours using Acrobat.

Good luck,

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Travis, this sounds interesting. Given that I do not have an "assistant" to task this to, could you enlighten me on how to do this?

Are you hot-linking all of your details? Do the detail markers look any different once they are linked?

Thanks in advance, Kevin

[ 01-16-2006, 01:40 AM: Message edited by: Kevin ]

[Travis]

Acrobat has a "drawing" pallet that will let you draw various shapes to which we assign no line or fill, but we assign a page link. We draw this invisible shape approximately the same and directly over the detail marker. When moused over, the shape causes the arrow to change indicating a "hot link". When clicked, the screen jumps to the linked page.

Obviously, the time it takes to create all the hot-links depends on the number of detail references. Makes a very powerful set of plans to carry around on one's laptop as well.

Good luck,

[Kevin]

Thanks Travis. It does not sound difficult, but certainly could be tedious. I will give it a try.

[Peter Eichel]

I've taken a hard look at Acrobat Pro 7.0. as you have all suggested. I've discovered that this new release can enable a comment feature allowing a client to mark up your PDF file using the free and downloadable Adobe Reader 7.0. Pro 7.0 also comes with Distiller for creating your PDF's. If the $450 US price tag doesn't bother you, it's compelling. I would still like to see the redline tool in the viewer. I'm told they have had a lot of requests to do so and will consider it