Drawing Mark-ups

[julie_tirone]

One more quick survey, folks-if you can help me out, once again!

This time it’s about Red Lining and marking –up drawings to get this information to your CAD operators.
Do you use a hand marked up print of the drawing?
Or an electronic Red line markup? If electronic-do you use DWF Composer or an in-house solution?

Our situation here is getting somewhat out of control as more and more engineers are using ACAD Lt. They will open up an official drawing, Save As on their computer and have at it. Moving objects, editing, deleting, adding,subtracting.slashing and burning. Then attach it to an email as the ‘Mark-up’. Chaos.
So….. knowing that the option of buying 30 or more copies of DWF Composer is probably not an option I’ve tried to emulate the functionality of DWF Composer by using an Xref, setting up a REDLINE layer and embedding frequently used BLOCKS. This method hasn't been adopted,yet so I still have time to refine it or come up with a better way.

So I guess I’m just wondering if others have come up with their own, perhaps, more elegant solution.

Any help is always appreciated.

Thanks

[andy.manninen]

I usually will redline on a paper set of the plans. That way i have a copy i can look at just like the contractor, redline it up and give it to a drafter to fix up. I dabbled with redlines on a PDF but the paper copy redlines are much easier to see, use, and check against. DO NOT LET NON-DRAFTERS INTO THE DRAWINGS, well at least not to change stuff. Things can get out of hand pretty quick if you have too many hands in the pot, especially if they don't really know how to do things.

:Cheers:

[rkmcswain]

This time it’s about Red Lining and marking –up drawings to get this information to your CAD operators.
Do you use a hand marked up print of the drawing?
Or an electronic Red line markup? If electronic-do you use DWF Composer or an in-house solution?

99% red pen/pencil markups on prints.

We have one engineer/designer team that is experimenting with DWFs and DWF composer.

Our situation here is getting somewhat out of control as more and more engineers are using ACAD Lt. They will open up an official drawing, Save As on their computer and have at it. Moving objects, editing, deleting, adding,subtracting.slashing and burning. Then attach it to an email as the ‘Mark-up’. Chaos.

When engineers here try that, designers are instructed to delete the email.
Out network permissions only allow designers and techs to modify drawings, for a reason.

[Wanderer]

Julie, Hand markups here 99.9999999% of the time. Occasionally someone will screen capture or scan drawings and make notes in ppt or something, but, that's pretty rare.

I hope you don't mind, I added a poll to get at a glance results.

One more quick survey, folks-if you can help me out, once again!

This time it’s about Red Lining and marking –up drawings to get this information to your CAD operators.
Do you use a hand marked up print of the drawing?
Or an electronic Red line markup? If electronic-do you use DWF Composer or an in-house solution?

Our situation here is getting somewhat out of control as more and more engineers are using ACAD Lt. They will open up an official drawing, Save As on their computer and have at it. Moving objects, editing, deleting, adding,subtracting.slashing and burning. Then attach it to an email as the ‘Mark-up’. Chaos.
So….. knowing that the option of buying 30 or more copies of DWF Composer is probably not an option I’ve tried to emulate the functionality of DWF Composer by using an Xref, setting up a REDLINE layer and embedding frequently used BLOCKS. This method hasn't been adopted,yet so I still have time to refine it or come up with a better way.

So I guess I’m just wondering if others have come up with their own, perhaps, more elegant solution.

Any help is always appreciated.

Thanks

[Maverick91]

Even when I work with an engineer in another of our offices, I deal in mark-ups on a sheet of paper -- usually in the form of a PDF file. We've figured out that we can scan a sheet to a PDF and email that, or fax mark-up. All of them would would rather have a piece of paper to hold a "bleed" (mark in red) all over anyway. And there's much less ambiguity if I missed something. I mark the red-lines up in yellow as I make the changes.

[JASONM30395]

I’ve tried to emulate the functionality of DWF Composer by using an Xref, setting up a REDLINE layer and embedding frequently used BLOCKS. This method hasn't been adopted,yet so I still have time to refine it or come up with a better way.

So I guess I’m just wondering if others have come up with their own, perhaps, more elegant solution.

Any help is always appreciated.

Thanks

Been there!!! Done that!!! And unless the Engineer is willing how to do it PROPERLY you'r still better off giving them a piece of paper to cut themselves with. (besides with paper, when thay come back to you and say "that's not what I wanted" you can pull it out of hiding and show them "exactly" what they wanted at the time.)

[julie_tirone]

Thanks for the responses everyone

Melanie-thanks for the Survey option Great idea. I have a gut feeling where this is going to go.

Unfortunately(!) I'm not one of the Powers that Be so our situation is what it is and I'm trying to come up with a solution that will give us back some control of an out of control system.
The engineers and technicians are encouraged by upper management to use ACAD LT to produce 'Sketches' which at some future point will be Cadded to standards as the official drawing. But the reality is when the future does arrive there's no time/budget for a CAD operator to spend 4-6 hours to re-Cad the sketch. So we slap a titleblock on it and call it a drawing.
This has now sequed(sp?) into a downloaded drawing being used as a 'Mark-up' with no indication on what has been changed/added/altered without an item by item comparison to the original. Some do try to show the changes but alot gets missed.

So if I can prevent them from butchering the Cad drawing but still leave them with the CAD tools for editing albeit on a stand alone layer that for our needs is the Electronic version of a paper mark-up.

It's not going to be easy to rein them in at this point in time most especially with little support from those that have the authority to enforce. But I'll give it a go.

Wish me luck.................

[Maverick91]

Thanks for the responses everyone

Melanie-thanks for the Survey option Great idea. I have a gut feeling where this is going to go.

Unfortunately(!) I'm not one of the Powers that Be so our situation is what it is and I'm trying to come up with a solution that will give us back some control of an out of control system.
The engineers and technicians are encouraged by upper management to use ACAD LT to produce 'Sketches' which at some future point will be Cadded to standards as the official drawing. But the reality is when the future does arrive there's no time/budget for a CAD operator to spend 4-6 hours to re-Cad the sketch. So we slap a titleblock on it and call it a drawing.
This has now sequed(sp?) into a downloaded drawing being used as a 'Mark-up' with no indication on what has been changed/added/altered without an item by item comparison to the original. Some do try to show the changes but alot gets missed.

So if I can prevent them from butchering the Cad drawing but still leave them with the CAD tools for editing albeit on a stand alone layer that for our needs is the Electronic version of a paper mark-up.

It's not going to be easy to rein them in at this point in time most especially with little support from those that have the authority to enforce. But I'll give it a go.

Wish me luck.................

As with any CAD management issue, when you have to talk to management, talk in dollars. Time is money, and point out how much time it takes to fix the errors in the "sketches". And what good is it to shell out bucks for software for people who aren't using it to its potential?

[julie_tirone]

As with any CAD management issue, when you have to talk to management, talk in dollars. Time is money, and point out how much time it takes to fix the errors in the "sketches". And what good is it to shell out bucks for software for people who aren't using it to its potential?

Thanks, Maverick91

Management already does think it is saving time/money by having the engineers engineer in CAD thus saving the step of handing off to CAD to have it done to standard. As a hard-copy- it walks like a drawing and that's pretty much as far as they want to look.

As a CAD department of 2 and a client base of about 50 (this has happened slowly over time as more and more eng's and techs have gotten ACAD LT) we would be hard-pressed to CAD all of the sketches. I'm just trying to come up with an alternative to the current mish-mash mark-up process for already approved drawings and present it as an In-House alternative to actually buying a product created for this purpose.

The hard-sell will be in convincing the Managers that they need to rein in their people from the current way of doing things and embrace a better way!
So I'd like to give them that better way.

[jaberwok]

How about a long-term, low-priority task for an outside contractor to CAD your sketches?