Bluebeam Revu 2018: reviewing, measuring and collaborating on PDF drawings

A 2018 webinar on Bluebeam Revu 2018, presented by Joana Alsasua for construction professionals. Revu is introduced as a PDF-based working environment for managing, editing and coordinating a project's documentation, and in this version the most visible change is the interface itself, simplified to leave more room for the document. The presenter goes through the navigation bar, the side panels and the profiles with which each user adapts the software to their own tasks. The first part focuses on navigation. Technical specifications and drawings are opened, and scrolling changes by itself when a drawing is opened, behaving as it would in a CAD program. From there the screen is split into several tabs to review two documents at once, zoom and scrolling are synchronised between them, and two versions of an elevation are compared: first with Overlay, which superimposes them in different colours, and then with document comparison, which automatically marks up every difference found, pixel by pixel. The markup block shows how a drawing is annotated and how the annotations are managed from the Markup List, which works like a spreadsheet: one row per markup, columns created by the user, review statuses, authors, subjects and assignees. The markup tools are shown (text boxes, highlighter, the revision cloud with a comment, stamps and images), how configurations are saved in the Tool Chest to standardise them, how Snapshot copies and pastes parts of the drawing, and how a PDF summary is generated in which each markup links to the exact point on the drawing. The measurement section begins by calibrating the PDF with two reference points and continues with lengths, areas, perimeters and counts. For areas with complicated geometry Dynamic Fill is used, closing outlines and filling the surface to obtain the area. The PDF is then connected to an Excel sheet through Quantity Link: the measurements are tagged with a bill item code and Excel reads them; when another measurement with the same code is added, the total updates in the sheet. The closing section belongs to Studio: projects work as a repository with check in and check out to avoid conflicts between versions, and sessions allow work on the same PDF in real time, with notifications, chat and a record of who made each change, exportable as a report. This is a 2018 recording: what is seen on screen corresponds to that version of the software.