For practices, contractors and consultants
Drawing sets are too big to upload, and too important to get wrong
An issue is fifty sheets that each have a number, a revision letter and a date, and the register has to agree with all of them. The consequence of a mistake is not embarrassment, it is somebody building to a superseded drawing.
Drawing work runs into a wall that most document tools never meet: size. A full architectural set at issue resolution is routinely hundreds of megabytes, and the free tools that would help are capped an order of magnitude below that — not because the operation is hard, but because every megabyte crosses somebody’s network and appears on somebody’s bill.
There is no server here, so there is no such bill and no such cap. The limit is the memory in the machine on your desk, which for this kind of work is usually a generous one. A folder of four thousand sheets is the same operation as one sheet, running for longer.
The confidentiality point is smaller than in medicine or law but it is real: a set under a non-disclosure agreement, a scheme before planning submission, or a client who would rather their project were not on an unknown third party’s storage. Not uploading it resolves that without anybody having to assess a vendor.
What to use
- Build a drawing registerReads the sheet numbers and revisions out of a set and produces the register, instead of one being typed from the title blocks and drifting.
- Compare two revisionsShows what actually changed between Rev C and Rev D when the transmittal says "minor coordination amendments".
- Preflight before issueCatches the problems that stop a set printing correctly, before it is with the contractor rather than after.
- Assemble the issueOne document in the order the register lists, which is what a site team can actually use.
- Stamp a continuous referenceGives every sheet in a bundle a reference that survives being printed, marked up and scanned back in.
- Run it over the whole setA set is a folder. There is no file count limit and no size limit here, so the folder is the unit of work.
What this will not do
Worth reading before you put a client’s file through it.
- — It reads PDFs. It is not CAD or BIM software, it does not open DWG, RVT or IFC, and it has no understanding of geometry.
- — A register is built from what the sheets say. If a title block is inconsistent or a revision was never stamped, the register will faithfully reproduce that — it is a reader, not a checker.
- — Comparison shows visual and textual differences. It does not know which differences are significant, and it is not a substitute for a coordination review.
- — Nothing is stored, so there is no shared register, no revision history and no common data environment. This produces files; managing them stays with your existing system.
Check it rather than trust it
Turn off your wifi and use any tool here. If the work still happens, the file is not going anywhere — that is a proof you can perform in three seconds, and it beats anything we could write. The longer version, with the protocol and the result, is on the proof page.
Everything here is free, MIT-licensed and has no account, quota or watermark. It is maintained by one person, unpaid. If it saves you an afternoon, you can support the work.