Bluebeam Revu 2017 screenshot. (Image courtesy of Bluebeam.)
When CAD was starting to catch on, if you wanted to collaborate with others on a project, you made reproductions of your drawings on a diazo or blue-line machine. In this process, copies were made of your originals that were typically on translucent paper such as velum, with a chemical process using ammonia and ultraviolet light. After that time-consuming process was complete, reproductions were given to the appropriate team members, trades, and stakeholders for review and markup. Revisions or corrections would then be made to the CAD file, and markups would be highlighted, signifying that they were complete, and the process would repeat until the final as-built documents were submitted and approved. While the next evolution of reproduction, which included large-format scanners and copiers, was much quicker and much-less noxious, there was still a lot of time and paper involved in communicating project progress, requested changes, and revisions. While we still occasionally print documents in our office to markup and highlight revisions as we go, we are slowly moving towards much more paperless solutions.
The next evolution in the markup and collaboration workflow came with the advent of the PDF file. One of the pioneers in that new workflow was Bluebeam. In 2002, Bluebeam brought tools for creating, editing, marking up, collaborating, and sharing PDF documents to the architectural, engineering, and…