The Power of Bluebeam Bookmarks

I’m always amazed at how few people actually use the Bookmarks feature in Bluebeam Revu. When I talk to folks about it, they just shrug and say something like “I’ve never looked at it.” The general consensus seems to be that it’s some sort of administrative/reporting feature that has no use in the design/build world and that couldn’t be more wrong! Bookmarks can be one of the most versatile and time-saving tools in the Bluebeam arsenal. Bookmarks can be used to create a master Table of Contents, as its own PDF, that will link to every page, plan, detail, and section in your drawings set. Think about that – giving everyone a single PDF, where they can just click on links to go directly to every item they need to see on your project. How many phone calls, emails, and hours of searching does that save you on your projects?

Let’s Create Some Bookmarks!

To begin, go to the BOOKMARKS tab and click the “Create Bookmarks” button. This brings up a dialog box (below). Choose the “Page Region” option and then click the “Select” button. Bluebeam will ask you to select a rectangular area on screen, where your page labels are. Normally, you’ll begin by zooming to and drawing a rectangle around your page number in the title border.

Bluebeam will let you select multiple areas to read from on your plans. I recommend using both the drawing number and name. When you select the first, a dialog comes up (below) that lets you continue to add more regions as needed. You can add regions for things like issue date, revision, etc. as needed. Just separate each value with a ( – ) space-dash-space format. In the example, Region1 is my page Number and Region 2 is my Page Label (note the Preview).

Click “OK” to continue and the original dialog comes back up (below). Make sure you set the “Pages” drop down correctly. If you have one border/title location on all plans, set “All Pages”. If you have different borders, say for Civil vs. Structural, then set page ranges and run the Bookmarks tool multiple times. When ready, click OK and Bluebeam will generate a list of all the drawings in your set under the Bookmarks tab.

The Bookmarks list (below) is automatically hyperlinked and clicking on the Bookmark for a given page takes you to that page, which is useful, but only a small part of Bookmark functionality.

You can also zoom to an area, like an Enlarged Plan and use the “ADD BOOKMARK” drop down to create a “Child” view of what’s currently on your screen and name it.

In the Bookmarks tab (below), the child view is created from your current view on screen. Just give each area/detail, etc. a name and they’re also added as bookmarks, but instead of a page, the link goes to that particular area.

Practical Use of Bookmarks

The bookmarks list is nice, but the real power of bookmarks lies in the ability to generate the list as a separate PDF. I usually store this in the root of the project folder, or link to it on the company intranet/project management tool. The idea is to provide one single location for people to go to and access every detail, note, and page of the project set without browsing or even needing to know where those items reside. To make this happen Click BOOKMARKS > EXPORT BOOKMARKS.

This brings up the “Export Bookmarks” dialog. Set the file “Save To” location, add extra files that have bookmarks if needed (using the ADD button) and click SAVE. This will generate a PDF with all the pages and child views you created as a master table of contents that anyone can open and just click on the linked page names to navigate every aspect of your project.

The final project Bookmark list looks like the below image, and anyone can easily find what they need on your jobs, instantly!

 – James Coppinger