In Bluebeam Revu, you are able to manipulate pages within a PDF with ease. However, the options to do so may not be readily apparent to new users. From the Document menu, there are many options for adjusting PDF pages – such as adding or replacing them. Options from the Documents menu will affect all pages in the PDF. This may prove frustrating to users who want to adjust individual pages instead. The more efficient way to manipulate pages is from the Thumbnails panel in the panel access bar. From here, users can perform a variety of PDF edits, such as adding blank pages or reordering pages.
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This article will cover how to use some of the PDF manipulation tools available from the Thumbnails panel. The following examples are from Bluebeam Revu 2018 – but the process will be the same for all versions of Revu.
Inserting Blank Pages
Before getting into the Thumbnails panel, there is a quick way to add a blank page to the end of the current PDF. With a document open, the Properties Panel will feature a Blank Page icon shortcut. Selecting this icon will add a blank page with default settings to the end of the open document.
If you want to choose where in the document the blank page is inserted, you will want to use the Thumbnails panel. Here, you can place new pages between two existing pages if needed. To open the panel, select the Thumbnails button from the panel access bar.
The Thumbnails panel will display all pages in the document as thumbnails in a grid. Selecting a specific thumbnail from the panel will jump to that associated page in the PDF.
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There are a couple different ways that you can add a blank page between two pages on the PDF. For one, you could select the Thumbnails panel header. This will provide a dropdown menu with page editing options. One option available will be Add Blank Page. The window that opens will allow you to choose exactly where to place the page in the PDF.
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You can also use the Add Blank Page shortcut from Properties toolbar and reorder the pages. Selecting Add Blank Page will, again, add a blank page to the end of the PDF. This page will have the same size and orientation as other pages in the drawing set.
Reordering Pages
With the page added, you can now reorder it in the PDF. To reorder pages, select a thumbnail and click, hold and drag it to a new location.
Additional Thumbnails Panel Tools
From the Thumbnails panel, you can access a wide variety of other page editing tools. To see all these options, select the Thumbnails dropdown menu from the panel. Here, you’ll find options to rotate pages, delete pages, or even extract pages as individual PDFs.
Adjusting Thumbnail Sizes
You can adjust the size of the thumbnails using the slider at the bottom of the Thumbnails panel. Moving the slider to the left will minimize the size of the thumbnails, and moving it to the right will expand them.
Hiding Page Labels
By default, page labels will display underneath the Thumbnails in the panel. Page labels allow you to name specific pages of a document for easier navigation.
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If you no longer need to view the page labels, you can hide them by selecting Hide/Show Page Labels button. You can set the page labels to show again by selecting the same button.
Creating Page Labels
You can change a thumbnail’s page label by double clicking on it and typing in a new label. If you don’t adjust the page labels, they will display the page number by default.
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You can also automatically create page labels, which is useful if you have a large document set. To do this, select the Create Page Labels button at the top of the Thumbnails panel. This will open a dialogue box, where you can choose to create page labels from Bookmarks or from a Page Region.
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If you have Bookmarks already set up, this is the easiest option – it will simply set the page labels to the corresponding bookmarks. If you don’t have Bookmarks set, you can create page labels from a region on this page. This will allow you to select a section of the document. Revu will find the text from that section on each page to use for the page label. This is often useful if you have a document with set sheet numbers in a specific region of the page.
These are just a few of the many options available from the Thumbnails panel. I would recommend exploring the rest of the options in the Thumbnails header to see the full extent of this panel. What do you like to use the Thumbnails panel for? Feel free to comment below!
If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please use the comment section on the bottom of this page, and don’t forget to subscribe to our blog to get more Bluebeam Revu tips & tricks directly in your inbox!
Lauren Hecker is the instructor for the Bluebeam Revu Essentials and Advanced courses. To see her next open enrollment course, please visit our Bluebeam Revu training page. To schedule an onsite or custom course, please contact us!
trying to drag pages to reorder and it is not working. every time i try to drag the circle with a diagonal line symbol keeps popping up and i cant move the page.
please help
Hi Isaac,
Are you using Revu in Markup mode? When Revu is in View mode you are unable to edit PDF documents. Let me know if this is not the case and I can look into it further.
Did you find a solution to this? I am having the same problem. Revu is set to Markup mode.
Hi Keri, I never got a response back from Isaac, so I’m not sure if he was in Markup mode or not. If you go to Document on the menu bar, and then to Security…, can you see if everything is set to “allowed” in the security tab of the dialogue box? Let me know and I can investigate further.
I AM CURRENTLY ON MARKUP MODE, EVERYTHING SET TO ALLOWED AND I AM GETTING THAT CIRCLE WITH DIALOGUE LINE NOT ALLOWING ME TO REORDER PAGES
Hi Christian, does this happen for all documents or just one? What edition and version are you using (for example, eXtreme 2019)?
Hi Christian, I’ve run across several issues with this issue and unfortunately there is not a clear cut solution as of yet. I would recommend trying to Reset you settings within Revu – this is a general cure-all for issues you may run into. Let me know if that helps.
Hi Keri, I’ve run across several issues with this issue and unfortunately there is not a clear cut solution as of yet. I would recommend trying to Reset you settings within Revu – this is a general cure-all for issues you may run into. Let me know if that helps.
Hi Isaac, I’ve run across several issues with this issue and unfortunately there is not a clear cut solution as of yet. I would recommend trying to Reset you settings within Revu – this is a general cure-all for issues you may run into. Let me know if that helps.
How do you take documents like excel and word on your desktop and add to your bluebeam document with thumbnails or any other way?
Hi Natalie! You can do this using the Bluebeam Revu PDF print driver. There are instructions on how to use this tool here: https://www.taradigm.com/how-to-use-the-bluebeam-pdf-print-driver/
Once the document is a PDF, you can add the PDF page to another PDF using the Insert Pages tool or Copy/Paste pages tool within the Thumbnails panel.
Let me know if you need more assistance – I’m happy to give further instructions.