When it comes to troubleshooting the measurement and calibration tools in Bluebeam Revu, there are generally three main issues that users run into:
- The page turns blue whenever you try to take a measurement
- The PDF won’t properly calibrate, or the measurements aren’t accurate
- When opening a PDF, a warning box appears that says: “This document contains ‘Untitled’ viewports which may interfere with calibration or measurements”
All of these issues occur due to viewports being present on the PDF. Viewports are sections of a drawing that uses its own scale. They allow you to set several scales for different portions of the same drawing.
The aforementioned issues will occur if the PDF has ‘Untitled’ viewports on it, which are generally created by other applications, such as AutoCAD, and can corrupt the calibration in Bluebeam Revu. The solution to all of these issues is to simply remove these viewports from the drawing.
This article will outline the process of removing viewports to solve a variety of troubleshooting issues, along with how to add a new viewport to set multiple scales on a PDF.
The following examples are taken using the 64x Bluebeam Revu eXtreme edition, but these functionalities are available within all versions of Revu.
To view existing Viewports on a drawing, open the Measurements panel.
The Viewports section will list all current viewports on the drawing. Selecting a viewport from the list will highlight the portion of the drawing that the viewport is located. The scale associated with the viewport will display in the upper left hand corner of the highlighted area.
Deleting Viewports
Deleting viewports is a common solution to calibration and measurement issues. If viewports are unintentionally present on a drawing, you will want to delete them before calibrating the page to ensure your measurements stay accurate. To delete a viewport, select it from the Viewport section and select the Delete Viewport icon.
Although viewports can cause issues with calibration when unintentionally present, they also can help ensure accurate measurements when working with a drawing with more than one scale.
For example, this drawing features a Site Plan and a Profile. Each section has its own scale on the same drawing. If you were to just calibrate the scale based on one section, measurements made in another section of the drawing won’t be accurate.
To ensure the accuracy of drawings with multiple scales, you can add new viewports to the drawing.
Adding Viewports
To add a viewport, select the Add Viewport icon under the Viewport section. The Add Viewport dialogue box will prompt you to select a region to define the viewport. Once the area has been selected, the viewport can be named and a scale can be applied to it. Select Apply and the viewport will be created. The viewport name will appear in the Viewports section.
Once viewports have been created for the drawing, measurements can then be performed. Because each section has been calibrated for the appropriate scale, you can be sure that the measurements will be accurate.
Lauren Hecker is a Bluebeam Certified Instructor and teaches Onsite Bluebeam Certified Courses, virtual Bluebeam Basics and Advanced courses, and custom onsite or virtual courses. To see her next open enrollment course, please visit our calendar. To schedule an onsite or custom course, please contact us!
If only I could delete unnamed viewports the way this material suggests.
Hi Charlie,
If you could provide more information about your problem, I would be happy to help.
You can email me directly at lhecker@taradigm.com
The document I have is locked. I can’t edit the Viewports. I want to measure something on the page but I can’t see the image due to the viewports. Is there a way to change the opacity of the viewports so I can take my measurements?
Hi Andrew,
Unfortunately you can’t adjust the opacity of Viewports – but they should be opaque by default. This might be more of the issue with the locked document, rather than the Viewports.
Let me know if I can assist with this any further.
My Bluebeam has a default setting turned on where it deletes all viewports when a file is opened and makes it so every file asks to be saved. Do you happen to know how to turn that setting off?
Hi Meikle,
Unfortunately I can’t find the setting to turn this option off. When you first open up a PDF with various Viewports, the program will ask you if you want to remove the viewports or keep them – along with a button to not show this window again. What might have happened is someone had chosen to delete Viewports and set the window to not open – this would cause it to happen everytime by default. My recommendation would be to try resetting your application. You can do this by selecting Revu > Preferences > Admin > Reset.
Hopefully that helps. Please let me know if this issue persists and I can assist further.
That helps. Only bad – all custom settings are gone and you’re starting fresh.
Go to Preferences>General>Options then click the “Reset Hidden Messages” button as the bottom.
Does deleting viewports delete anything else? I don’t want to delete text/linework.
Thanks!
Hi Tim,
Deleting Viewports will just delete the saved scale associated with the area – it should not delete any markups or measurements.
Hey there. I have a pdf document with some annotations. But the annotations object doesn’t contain measure property. Can I able to add measure property to the annotation by using the same way?
Hi Dinesh,
You won’t be able to add measurements to annotations using Viewports in Revu, unfortunately. Instead, you can use custom Markups List columns to track measurments manually, or you can create new Measurement Markups and associate the annotation information with them.
can I stop cad from plotting them completely? I would rather it just did not have this feature enabled.
Hello!
According to the Autodesk website this can be done by doing the following:
1. Select all viewports of the layout and save them on a separate layer – for example save them all on a new layer called “Viewports”.
2. Enter “LA” on the command line to open Layer Manager.
3. Click the plot symbol of layer “Viewports” to get the setting “No Plot” for this layer.
perfect explanation, thank you very much
Hello Lauren,
Thanks for the article. I had the same question as Tim Larkin above. It was not evident in the article nor the Bluebeam message that popped up if deleting the viewport would delete the content within. I understand now. I am new to Bluebeam, but it would be nice to retain these viewports to be used properly. Maybe Bluebeam could have the option to give them titles “Viewport-1, Viewport-2…) or similar, then the user can find them after opening the file and calibrate their scales, so they can be utilized at their scale while the rest of the page can also be utilized at their scale too. If I delete them on the new 88-page plan set I am opening, how will I easily find them to add the viewports back in? I must be missing something. Thanks, Nils
Hi Nils,
If you delete the Viewports from the document that come in from CAD or another program, you will need to manually add them back in. As this would be a lot of work, I would recommend keeping the existing Viewports and manually naming and reviewing them as you go through the document.
In the Viewports panel, you can click on the Viewport in the panel to see where it is in the document and you can double click on the name of the Viewport to change it.