Markups Overview

The Newforma Viewer enables you to quickly mark up and annotate markupsWhen you use pan and zoom to navigate around a drawing, you can save the current location as a markup. You can manage markups in the Views tab of the Drawing Explorer dialog box and in the Markups panel of the Newforma Viewer. to illustrate or resolve an action item or to assemble a reviewer response to a submittal or RFI.

Opening and marking up a drawing in the Newforma Viewer does not alter the source file. When you save a markup session, it is saved as a Project Center item, similar to a submittal or RFI.

CAD experience is not required to mark up a drawing. The Newforma Viewer gives you easy-to-use tools such as customizable markup pens, revision clouds, leaders, stamps, multi-line text, and other tools. You can quickly create multiple markups for a markup session, link the markups to action items, submittals, or project files, and save the markup session associated with the underlying source drawing file to a project. The markup image tool allows you to add a scanned image of your signature or professional stamp to the markup session.

The markup process leaves behind an audit trail for future use. Anybody on the project team can select a project drawing and use the Related Markup Session activity center to browse, preview, and add comments to markups in any related markup sessions. After markups have been reviewed and corrections have been made to the source drawings and models, you can close open markup sessions and they will remain a permanent part of the project record.

Markup text, including the name and comments associated with each individual markup, is searchable using the Project Center Search feature.

Red line sets

Markup also supports a drawing set “red line” workflow to enable team-based review, markup, and commenting of large milestone sets of project drawings. You can use document sets to aggregate each project team member’s markup sessions. Project team members can link their markup sessions to the document set using either the Relate to task from the Related Items tab in the Project Markup Sessions activity center or the icon from the Newforma Viewer toolbar.

Team members can also add the source drawing to a document set. All markup sessions related to the source files in the document set will be listed as related items in the Related Items tab. The document set’s related markup sessions can then be consolidated and reviewed using the Project Document Set activity center’s Review Related Markup Sessions task. You can then create a formatted markup report containing each markup session and any associated comments as documentation of a red line set markup review.

Markup session status (open and closed)

Drawings are marked up many times over the course of a project. Typically, markups are used to identify problems, clarify information, or make corrections. Once the problem or correction is made in the source drawing, the markup no longer applies. With hard copies, the drawings are plotted and then passed around the office to be physically marked up by individual team members. The drawings, commonly referred to as a red line set, are then returned to the CAD operators who modify the drawings as necessary, and the red line set is then filed to the project archive. A new set of drawings is subsequently plotted, perhaps in advance of the next milestone, and the process is repeated.

The Newforma Viewer supports this markup workflow digitally by applying a status field to each markup session in the Markups panel. When a markup session is initially created, its status is set to Open. Instead of plotting drawings, a group markup review is initiated by sending everyone an email invitation containing a link to the document set that needs to be reviewed. After everyone completes their markup sessions, there are then lots of Open markup sessions. The CAD operators review these in Project Center and correct the CAD source files as required. Once a markup session has been adequately addressed, its status is changed to Closed. This process allows the project team to focus on the open markup sessions while retaining an archive of previous markup sessions.

Marking up BIM models

To markup a Revit or ArchiCAD BIM model (or any other file not supported by the Newforma Viewer), you can launch the file in its native application and use the Newforma Snapshot Tool to capture the screen to create a markup session. When saving a screen capture as a markup session, use the Associate with Project File option in the Save dialog box to designate a drawing as the source file for the markup session. If the BIM model was opened from Project Center, it will appear in the drop-down list.

To begin marking up drawings

Select one of the supported CAD, .PDF, or raster file formats from any list of files in Project Center and click the Open with Newforma Viewer task to open the drawing and mark it up in the Newforma Viewer.