Bluebeam Revu

Bluebeam works perfectly with drafting and producing drawings through Civil 3D. It's quick and convenient to use for engineering drawings. One particularly great feature, is the ability to calibrate your own scale and measure quantities to scale. It is a great tool for producing markups and redlines on PDFs to share with the team. Before the pandemic, we occasionally did the markups and comments by hand, now it's exclusively all through PDF markups.

When they have yearly program version updates, they tend to change the UI around so it takes some time to relearn the Bluebeam features. For the polyline feature, it's annoying having to press enter to finalize the command and save the line drawn (especially if it's not a close polygon). I use this tool daily and it's extremely annoying when I lose my line! I would love it if they made it so a right-click during the command saves and exits so I can complete the entire command with my mouse.

One of Bluebeam Revu's noteworthy features, in my experience as a user, is its customisable user interface. It's amazing that I'm able to design a workspace that is suited to my own requirements and tastes, complete with unique toolbars, keyboard shortcuts, and markups and stamps that are uniquely mine.As a design professional, the software's markup and collaboration tools have changed the game by enabling me to annotate and comment on PDF projects in real time. We can all simultaneously work on the same document, which has been useful when working with project teams. The markup tools have been quite helpful, such as text boxes, callouts, highlighters, and others.

As a user of Bluebeam Revu, I've found that the software can be both a blessing and a curse. While it has many strengths, such as its customizable user interface and extensive markup and collaboration tools, some potential downsides to the user experience should be considered.One of the main cons of using Bluebeam Revu is that it can have a steep learning curve. When I started using the software, I found it overwhelming and challenging to understand all the features and capabilities. Learning how to use the software effectively took me some time, especially since I was not accustomed to working with PDF documents or collaboration tools. However, with practice and persistence, I overcame these initial hurdles.It's worth noting that the learning curve may be less steep for users who have experience working with PDF documents or other collaboration tools. However, it may take some time for those new to these types of software to get up to speed.

Primarily one might feel it's just another PDF reviewer and editor similar to Adobe Acrobat Pro, but this is more catered towards engineering jobs. It's easy to make markups on the drawings, with specific options like revision clouds, grid lines among other things. One can also make some specific markups and save them in their tool box. One neat feature is the ability to compare two documents by overlaying them on top of each other. This is especially helpful to check if their were any changes in different revisions of the drawings which can be easily missed by a normal human review.

Since it's so much loaded with features, sometimes it becomes difficult to find exactly what you needed to do. It is in such times that I miss the simplicity of Adobe Acrobat Pro, where the User Interface is clean. But then again Adobe is catered towards a general document review whereas Bluebeam Revu caters engineering firms. I would like to see an option to turn on and off the detailed User Interface to get a more simplistic Adobe like interface as required.