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What PDF Drawing Take Off Software Are You Using?

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Tim Pickles
•Mar 06, 2018
Direct Security

Just wondering what software packages people are using to enable an auto take off from PDF drawings of device symbols?

We are looking at a package that will count the individual device symbols in a second or two, compile into an an excel spreadsheet and has nice bolt-one functions like "remove background" to leave just symbols, auto coloring of symbols once counted etc. It can also determine device count differences between drawing revisions.

Sounds boring to some - but if your'e estimating day in and day out, these packages can save hours, stress and reduce counting errors, hence the question what do people use at the moment as I've been unable to find anything (up to now) that works for us.

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Brian Rhodes
•Mar 06, 2018
IPVMU Certified

Bluebeam has this feature, and we demo it in our Bluebeam Revu Security Floorplan Estimation App Test.  I don't think I would trust it to be accurate 100%, but it might speed up takeoffs by double checking counts.

Here is an excerpt from that report:

Takeoff and Estimation Features

However, if video designs are 'done by others' or previously drawn into a set of plans, Revu could offer a big advantage in cost estimation work. In the video below, we examine the visual 'search' function and how it can speed up the takeoff process for building quotes:

While the output forms are still manually populated, a Revu-based takeoff for a large project can be done in minutes, rather than hours if searching camera locations and details manually.

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Yves Tremblay
•Mar 06, 2018
Ecmor Sécurité Inc • IPVMU Certified

I'm a hardcore Bluebeam user for one year now. While Bluebeam can speed up your take-off, and export it to .csv, It is far from beeing a breeze. It can make a visual search on symbols, or whatever text you are looking for in a pdf, but all pdf's are not created equals. They all differs depending on the engineering firm that produce them. Some includes all markups, some don't, some are copys and have been flatten or copys of jpeg, it's a jungle. The visual search does not always work. What's cool about Bluebeam is that you can use the Count feature manually applying colored symbol to the plans, you can rename every sets of symbols, these will populate your markup tab, witch you can export to .csv and resave as an .xlsx later on. I find this method faster and more accurate then trying to automate the process, you will encountered way too much omissions and falses find with the visual search and it's very cpu hungry. You will find methods to unlock documents like creating them from an existing files, then OCR it. Then you should be able to find text markups like CR, DP, CAM' ect.. It's also a good tool for cable measurements. Good luck with it. Beware, it's not cheap.

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TM
Tom McVey
•Mar 06, 2018
IPVMU Certified

I currently use Bluebeam, although I don't use it to its full capabilities.  

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