Skip to main content

Import your markups from Bluebeam Revu

Bring your Bluebeam Revu measurement markups and scale into Exayard from a marked-up PDF.

Written by Sarah Chen

If you've done takeoff in Bluebeam Revu, you can bring your measurements into Exayard by uploading the marked-up PDF. Exayard reads your length, area, count, and volume markups along with the page scale, so you don't have to remeasure.

Run the import

Your markups live inside the PDF itself, so you just need the PDF you measured on.

  • Upload it normally. When you add a Bluebeam PDF to a project, Exayard notices the markups and shows a banner: "We found N measurements — import them?" Click Import them.

  • Or import directly. Click Add files, then Import from another tool, and drop in the PDF.

Your imported markups appear on a layer named Imported from Bluebeam Revu, so you can show or hide them together.

If you export your markups as a .bax file, upload it together with the PDF it came from. A .bax file holds only the markups, not the drawing, so Exayard needs both.

What comes across

  • Length and perimeter markups, as linear measurements.

  • Area and volume markups, as area measurements. Volume depth is kept as a note.

  • Count markups, with each placed count preserved.

  • Scale, read from the page's measurement calibration. Pages without a scale come in uncalibrated so you can set it yourself.

  • Colors, and extra details like custom columns and spaces, kept as notes for reference.

A few things to check first

  • Flatten undoes the import. A flattened PDF has no live markups left to read. If your export looks empty, go back to Revu and re-save without flattening (or unflatten), then upload again.

  • Finish Studio Sessions first. While a drawing is in a Bluebeam Studio Session, the markups live on Bluebeam's servers, not in your copy of the PDF. Take a Snapshot in Revu to bake the markups into a downloadable PDF, then import that.

  • Remove passwords. Exayard can't read a password-protected PDF. In Revu, use Save As without security, then upload the unprotected copy.

What doesn't come across

  • Non-measurement markups like clouds, text notes, and stamps. Exayard imports takeoff measurements, not general annotations.

  • Angle measurements, which don't map to a takeoff quantity.

The import always finishes and lists anything it skipped, so you can see exactly what came across.

Did this answer your question?