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!