Drawings

Drawings: what it does and how it works

Drawings of a construction site. Sheet: number, title, section, floor or room of the site, author, date, revision, links to work, contractors and documents. A file is a PDF or an image; DWG and DXF can be attached as source files, but they can’t be opened or edited: only PDFs and images can be viewed and marked up. Viewing: zoom with the wheel and buttons, pan, pinch and drag on a phone, full screen, jump to a page, text search in PDF; pages are drawn in tiles at the visible zoom, so a large sheet doesn’t freeze the window.

Markup (lines, arrows, rectangles, clouds, text, pins) is stored separately from the file, one layer per author; the original drawing never changes. A pin can become a site task, and a photo can be attached to it. A new revision needs a reason; the previous one becomes “Superseded”, and there is always exactly one current one; a contractor sees drawings only if assigned to their organization or their work, and only the current revision (a superseded one opens by link with a note). Revisions are compared side by side, by toggling, by overlay and pixel by pixel on the rendered pages.

A new revision is distributed to chosen recipients, with acknowledgment confirmed per revision; whoever hasn’t acknowledged it is a site issue. A copy of a sheet can be saved in the browser to work offline: it is marked with a date and may be out of date, and markup and acknowledgment aren’t sent without a connection. No claim is made that sheet formatting complies with regulations.