- Sometimes, you just have to work with what you have,
so let's take a look at working with digital drawings
using Adobe Acrobat.
This is PDF software that's not necessarily custom made
for construction drawings,
but it's software that's been around for quite a while.
So now I have my default for PDF files
set to open in Adobe Acrobat.
Let's go ahead and double click on our sample drawing files
and let's go ahead and get rid of our welcome screen
and you'll see that our sample drawing files
have opened up perfectly right here in Adobe Acrobat.
And if I go ahead and page down,
I can click through all of my pages
and view my construction drawings.
So that's great, but let's look at a couple of the tools
and maybe a couple of the limitations
of the software as well.
So, one of the reasons I started this series
was showing you the software that I showed you
is it's really, again, custom made for working with
these large format drawing files
that we use in construction.
And, one of the things I talked about,
and I told you that was kind of important because
these files can get really large
and sometimes it's a pain to open up a file if it has
a thousand pages
and you're really just looking for one sheet.
So that is one of the limitations here in Adobe Acrobat is,
I don't really have an automated way
to split this thing apart and name those files
and then work with them as a single set,
so let's take a look at what I can do with it.
You saw this file open fairly quickly.
Again, it's 93 pages,
so sometimes leaving all of the sheets together
as a single file is really not that big a deal.
It can still load quickly and, you know,
particularly on a small residential project like this,
it might be just fine.
Let's look at how we can navigate through this though.
If I come over to the left side of the screen,
I'm going to click on this little gray arrow
and I'm going to click here that says
this is the icon for the page thumbnails.
So, this gives me my page thumbnails.
This is one way I can navigate through
and click on all of my drawings
and look at the different sheets.
Now you'll notice that
these sheets are just numbered one, two, three, four.
I don't have that nice system of the software naming
the sheets the same as the title block has them named.
And there's really not an automated way to do that here,
but what you might do is click on bookmarks
and what you might find, like we see here,
is that when the designer created these drawings,
they added bookmarks in their CAD software
that allowed them to navigate,
and those bookmarks, in this case,
got brought over to our PDF file.
And you can see they're even grouped into trade disciplines,
so I have architectural, fire protection,
plumbing, mechanical, electrical, civil and so on.
And so in this case I'm probably going to navigate
through my drawings using the bookmarks
instead of the thumbnails.
Now while I'm here though,
let's go ahead and take a look at another tool
that is available in this pane.
If I click on options,
I do have the ability to do what's called
extracting the pages.
So, at this point, I could go ahead and say
I want to extract page one to 93
and click on extract pages as separate files.
If I clicked on, okay, the software would
pull this file set apart and give me 93 different files,
one for each sheet.
The issue is that in Adobe Acrobat then,
it doesn't give me a nice way to work with those as a set
like we've seen in other pieces of software,
but if you do need to pull out an individual sheet
to email it to somebody, this is where you would do it.
So for now, let's cancel that
and let's go ahead and close this tool pane
so we get a little more room,
and let's take a look at what we can do, again, here
with the markup and measuring tools that are available.
Because I do have some tool sets that are available
in this paid version of Adobe Acrobat
that you might not have
in a free version of just a PDF reader.
So let's go over to the other side of the page,
the right side and click on that little gray arrow.
And here we have some tools that are available to us.
And there's a lot of tools, some of them I might need,
some of them I might not.
I'm going to go ahead and remove most of them
because I want to show you that you can actually set this up
to kind of work for your construction drawing workflow.
So there's a lot of tools here that I probably don't need.
We'll just right click on them and click on remove shortcut
and get rid of them.
Now let's go ahead and add some tools
that I think I probably do need
to work with construction drawings.
Let's come up here to tools in the menu bar
and I'm just going to add a couple to show you how to do this.
I definitely want a measuring tool because
these are construction drawings
and I need to be able to scale and measure things.
So I'm going to add that shortcut back
and, oh just for the sake of showing you,
we'll add a stamp shortcut.
This is something that would allow us to stamp things like
approved or a date received right on our drawings.
Okay, and for now we'll just leave those two tools
as the one that we add to our shortcut toolbar.
And when we're done we can click on our drawing name again,
our file name and get back to our drawings.
So you can go through and customize this
and add as many shortcuts and tools as you want.
But let's take a look at how some of these tools work.
So, let's go ahead and scroll down to
a page that has some dimensions on it.
We're going to use our foundation plan
and see if we can't measure a couple of things.
So, I'm going to click on zoom in
and let's get to where
we can actually see some measurements.
And before I get too excited about measuring things,
I want to calibrate my measuring tools.
So, for each sheet that you use the measuring tool on,
you're going to need to calibrate the measuring tool.
And that kind of makes sense because
throughout your set of drawings,
the scale the drawing is drawn to will tend to change.
So, architectural scale of a quarter inch
equals a foot is fairly common.
If I were to flip to my civil drawings,
I might have a scale of one inch equals 20 feet.
And so, again, before we use the measuring tool,
it's got to be calibrated
so it gives us the right dimensions.
The way you calibrate that is just a click on measure,
and I'm going to click on measuring tool
and that opens up my measuring tools for me,
but remember I'm still not calibrated,
so I'm going to go ahead and just
right click anywhere on the document
and click on change scale ratio and precision.
And in this case, again, right down here,
my scale is one quarter inch equals a foot.
So let's change this to one quarter inch equals one foot
and click on, okay, and let's see how we did here.
So, I'll go ahead and click here.
Now I do want to point out that,
you see how my tool is snapping right to the intersections
of the dimensions that are drawn on this,
on this set of plans?
And that is because this is a vector PDF.
There's a difference between vector PDFs
and maybe image PDFs.
And in vector PDFs, these lines and intersections
are really lines and intersections.
It's not just a snapshot or a scan
or a photo of the drawing.
And that makes it really nice because
our tools will snap right to where we want them.
So, let's go ahead and click here.
We'll click here.
I can't see it, so I'm going to drag that down.
And when I'm done, I'm going to click on the mouse a third time
and it gives me my dimensions, 4.19 feet.
So, again, it converts it into feet.
I don't get feet and inches,
but this was a really good, quick and easy way to measure.
If I didn't have some dimensions already on the drawing,
I can snap right here, pull that down and get 26 feet.
So the measuring tool is really a nice feature to have
when I'm working with construction drawings.
And let's scroll up and
to show you one more thing we can do.
We can measure areas as well.
And just let this snap right to the corners of our room.
Pick the corners.
When I'm done,
it's going to close and I see that my area is 571 square feet.
I can also see that I didn't do a very good job
of drawing my square,
so I can select that and go ahead and drag these
to wherever I need to
so that I'm actually getting the correct dimensions
of my room back at 572.5 square feet.
Again, this kind of just gives you a really good idea
of some of the ways that you can use these tools
to do things that you would typically do
on a set of paper drawings.