ADR Digital Pen Solutions?

[jthompson.29234]

I was in awe a few years ago when the digital pen application for ADR was demonstrated at the CAD Camp in Boston. In 2008 the pen application was sold to Adapx, who had the infinite wisdom inn a short period of time to drop ADR as a supported application to work with the pen, in favor of PDF. It seems like everything we get that's awesome is quickly taken away. In the years since 2008 when Adapx stopped selling the ADR compatible pen, Adobe has now stopped supporting Autodesk. No matter, since DWFis superior to PDF from an architectural standpoint.

With Adapx unfortunate decision, are there any other solutions out there that would allow us "old salts" to use a digital pen to create redlines, like the adapx pen used to? Is ADR compatible with a tablet PC approach?

Please help us old hand drafters!

[m20roxxers]

We use midte touch pens in our office. These allow you to mark up a screen or any surface you choose but it will work on the screen. It can also save markups and sketches created from ink with the pens not connected to the computer at all, and upload them onto the computer. It also works with PDF, word, excel and directly onto a white board screen option.

We have found them very responsive and have some standard LCD screens built on support frames to make it more natural to markup. Our dwf have a number of setup symbol items to make certain tagging much easier and you can copy,paste then just click the points where you like the paste.

They are around $100 Australian per pen. Ink refills are cheap as chips.

[Mlabell]

We are in the process of adding a digital USB tablet by Adesso to our digital markup process. The model is the CyberTablet M14 and retails for ~$200 US. The tablet works seemlessly with ADR, adobe writer, NavisWorks and other redline applications. The bonus with the tablet is there are 30+ customizable hot keys so a user does not need to learn a specfic program per-se, rather they just need to learn how to use the tablet. Tablet PC's also work in a similar manner but are still very expensive and cannot be shared by reviewers as easily.