Round Trip - detour or road-block?

[kknauss]

I'm in the process of doing electronic drawing review for a project and am in the middle of seeing how DWF Composer can facilitate this process. So far I've marked up a DWF with comments. Then I loaded the markup in Autocad. Loading the sheet works great but this is where I hit the road block.

When I did my electronic review marked up dwfs that were created from sheet drawing files (e.i.: .dwgs that contain model xrefs). I realized that by sending the DWF sheets back for correction the one loading them into AutoCAD through the markup tool will only have access to the AutoCAD sheet file. In other words the markups will be shown but only relative to the sheet drawings. Any changes being made will have to be done at the model level therefore they will need to open the xref contained in the sheet for editing. In doing so, the markups displayed will be disconnected. Doesn't this create a slight detour in the round-trip DWF composer claims to offer?

I guess one work around to this would be for me, the reviewer, to recognize what model files those making corrections will need to open and make my markups in those files - but we all know how silly that sounds don't we? To me this would be considered a complete road block and counter intuitive to the process of drawing review.

The detour approach would be saying that yes - markups made to sheet files, with model xrefs attached, would need to be corrected by opening the model file thus disassociating the markup originally created. I assume this is how others are doing it.

If not, could someone please inform me as to a better way?

Thanks,

Kerry
ADT 2005
DWF Composer v. 1

[jhohman]

Rather than trying to view the markups in AutoCAD, why not print out the sheets of the DWF that contain the markups, then you would have a hard copy to look at while you open and modify the xref files?

[kknauss]

This thought had occurred to me but correct me if I'm wrong, this would be doing it the old way (printing a hard copy) and I'm hoping to do it a better way (keep it electronic - save a tree). That being said, maybe the old way is the better way which makes me wonder why mark things up electronically at all.

Thanks for your reply,

Kerry

[rfuller]

I implemented DWF Composer with the dream of not having to print the red lines. I noticed that my CAD Operators were still printing all of the redlines because it just made the process easier. To solve that issue I purchased video cards for our computers that have dual monitor capabilities. Now on one screen they have AutoCAD and the other screen the redlines. It's not perfect, but they stopped printing everything.

Hope this helps!

[kknauss]

I like your thinking. We're also in the process of updating our graphics cards to support Two monitors. It only makes sense to give more virtual desktop.

Regards,

Kerry