Drawings, revisions and export

Everything in this article is about the drawing rather than the measuring: keeping the page rail tidy, moving a take-off onto a new revision, and producing a marked-up PDF you can send to someone.

Hiding pages you will never measure

A drawing set usually carries pages there is nothing to take off: general notes, specification text, a title sheet, photographs. Paging past them all day is friction you do not need.

Hover a page thumbnail and click the eye icon to hide it. It disappears from the rail, and the page arrows skip straight over it.

The PDF is never changed

Hiding is a Take-Off setting, nothing more. The page is still in the file in Documents, still there for everyone else, still printed and still issued. You are only tidying your own measuring view.

Hidden pages come back whenever you want. Once anything is hidden, the top of the page rail offers “N pages hidden — show”; turn it on and they reappear, greyed out, each with an eye icon to restore it. The page counter also reads “/ 24 (19 shown)” so the difference is never a mystery.

A page with measurements on it cannot be hidden

If you try, Take-Off refuses and tells you how many measurements are in the way.

That is deliberate. A hidden page’s measurements would go on counting toward the field’s quantity — and so toward the BOQ — while being invisible and unreachable. A number you cannot trace back to anything on a drawing is worse than no number at all. Delete the measurements first if the page really is not one you meant to measure.

Is this shared with my colleagues?

Yes — unlike hiding a field, which is your own view only. “Page 12 is a notes sheet” is a fact about the drawing rather than a personal preference, so hiding it once spares everyone on the costing the same nuisance.

When a drawing is re-issued

Drawings change. When you open a revision of a drawing you had previously measured on, Take-Off notices and offers to carry your take-off forward:

Carry take-off over to A-101 Rev C? A-101 Rev B has 34 measurements across 3 pages for 5 fields. Copy them onto Rev C?

Carrying over copies every measurement onto the new revision, in the same place, and moves your quantities with them. Nothing on the old revision is changed or deleted.

This is never automatic. A re-issued drawing may have changed exactly where you measured, so Take-Off asks every time.

Reviewing what came across

Carried measurements arrive flagged for review — drawn with a dashed orange halo, and counted in a banner at the top of the fields panel:

18 carried measurements need review — the drawing may have changed.

Work through them against the new drawing. Adjusting a measurement clears its flag automatically; if it is still correct, use Confirm on this page or Confirm all.

Take the review seriously

The whole point of a revision is that something changed. Confirming all without looking is the one way this feature can quietly put a wrong number in your BOQ.

If the page numbers have changed

If the new revision has gained or lost a sheet, expand the page mapping and tell Take-Off where each page should go. Pages you do not map are skipped and reported back, rather than guessed at.

Declining

Not now dismisses the offer for this session. Never for this drawing remembers. Neither deletes anything — the old take-off stays exactly where it is.

Printing and sharing a marked-up drawing

Export produces a PDF of the drawing with your measurements drawn on it.

• Only the pages that carry measurements are included. A 40-page drawing set with measurements on three sheets exports as three sheets.
• With a field selected, you export just that field. With none selected, you get everything measured on the drawing.
• Each page carries a small legend: the page number, its scale, and a colour swatch and subtotal for each field on it.
• A summary page lists every measurement by page, with the field totals.

The original drawing underneath stays sharp and searchable — the overlay is drawn as vector, not as a picture of your screen — so the export prints exactly as crisply as the drawing did.

This is the document to attach to a query, send to a subcontractor, or keep on file to show how a quantity was arrived at.

Colours and drawing style

Each field has its own colour, so you can see at a glance what has been measured and what has not. Take-Off assigns a new field the next unused colour in the costing; change it from the field’s settings.

In the same dialog:

• Area fill — how solid area shading is, from outline-only to solid.
• Line thickness — how heavy the lines are.

Both matter more than they sound. The overlay sits on top of a drawing you still need to read through: a sparse site plan takes a solid fill happily, a dense services layout does not. The dialog shows a live sample over some drawing linework so you can judge it.

Both settings apply to the exported PDF as well, so what you see on screen is what prints. Tick Apply this style to every field in the costing to set them everywhere at once — colours stay per field, since telling fields apart is what they are for.

Hiding a page’s measurements to see the drawing

The eye at the top-right of the drawing (or H) hides every measurement on the page you are looking at, so you can read the plan underneath. Press it again to bring them back. The thumbnail keeps its count, marked with an eye-slash, so a page that looks empty isn’t mistaken for one.

This is a view setting for you only — nothing is deleted, no quantity changes, the export still includes them, and colleagues still see them. The field you are measuring into stays visible while the page is hidden, so what you draw is never invisible and everything else stays out of the way until you show it again.

It is different from hiding the page (the eye on the thumbnail), which removes a non-drawing sheet from Take-Off for everyone.

Hiding a field

The eye icon next to a field hides it on the drawing. Useful for seeing what is underneath a dense area.

The eye on an assembly heading does the whole group at once — one click to take every measured field in that assembly off the drawing, another to bring them back. It follows the group: while any field in it is still showing, the button hides them all; once they are all hidden, it shows them all.

Hiding is a view setting for you only. It changes no quantity, and colleagues looking at the same costing still see the field. Hiding the field you are measuring into also stops it being the active one — otherwise every shape you drew would vanish the moment you finished it.

Measure with AI (pilot)

When it is switched on for your company, the top of every field’s list has a Measure with AI button. Press it and the AI looks at the page in front of you and proposes measurements for that field — its name, unit and default height are the brief, and anything you have already measured into it shows what “one of these” looks like on this drawing.

Proposals arrive orange and marked for review, exactly like measurements carried over from an earlier revision, and they don’t count toward the field until you accept them.

• The banner quotes what the AI read the field as. If it read it wrong, type a hint (“only the garage”) and press Try again.
• Tick or cross each proposal in the list, or Accept all / Discard run from the banner. Drag corners first if a shape is nearly right.
• The counter under the button shows how much of the month’s allowance is used. Every press counts, whether you keep the result or not.

What is sent

Each press sends an image of the page to the AI service. Nothing is sent unless you press the button, and the feature is off unless your company has asked for it.