Wishes
Post your wishes about Graphisoft products: Archicad, BIMx, BIMcloud, and DDScad.

A tool that let's you easily compare revised drawings

Anonymous
Not applicable
A tool that would be VERY helpful for contractors and subcontractors is one that allows the architect to save the drawings in various states of completion (design development, bid, construction,delta 1,as-built, etc.) and then allows for a quick and easy comparison between these various stages. Perhaps a tool that has a different color for the old and new drawings so that when overlaid, it is easy to see what has been removed and what has been added; this is similar to the comparison tool that the Etakeoff program has (I am in no way affiliated with this company - I work for a general contractor).
10 REPLIES 10
Barry Kelly
Moderator
I think you could probably do this now using Trace & reference (versions 11 & 12).
For 2D drawings this would be a simple copy and paste from one plan into another storey or worksheet of the plan to be compared.
For 3D model you would need to create a worksheet view and then copy that to a worksheet in the second plan/model.
Or maybe you could add a module of the whole model beside the one to be compared.

Then just set that as you Trace & Reference.
You can control the colours, position, rotation, etc. and even have the splitter option for peeling back the images.

Not a perfect solution but it should work.
It would be handy if you could Trace & Reference to a second model directly if you need to do that.
Barry.
One of the forum moderators.
Versions 6.5 to 27
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Anonymous
Not applicable
I just save PDF's for the different stages, and you could easily use the trace reference to overlay different drawings.

Your wish is granted!
Chazz
Enthusiast
Every milestone (SK, DD, CD, etc) and every transmitted exhibit, etc should be archived to PDF. Nothing you probably don't already know.

PDF is more of a platform than a file format or a application and there are definitely very robust comparison solutions using PDF.

CH
Nattering nabob of negativism
2023 MBP M2 Max 32GM. MaxOS-Current
Anonymous
Not applicable
Chazz wrote:
Every milestone (SK, DD, CD, etc) and every transmitted exhibit, etc should be archived to PDF.
Exactly!
Anonymous
Not applicable
Thank you all. That seems like a good solution already.

As a follow up question/idea, is there any way to do this with large batches of files? For example, if there's a large project with, say, 200 pdfs, could you tell it to take these 200 original sheets and overlay these 200 new sheets in another color and then spit out 200 new pdfs of the comparison? It seems like this is a repetitive enough task that a program could be written...
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
comparison_tool wrote:
As a follow up question/idea, is there any way to do this with large batches of files? For example, if there's a large project with, say, 200 pdfs, could you tell it to take these 200 original sheets and overlay these 200 new sheets in another color and then spit out 200 new pdfs of the comparison? It seems like this is a repetitive enough task that a program could be written...
This could be done with an 'action' script in Adobe Photoshop (with conversion to images).

It can be done using the Acrobat Profesional 'compare documents' command, but automation is not provided within Acrobat ...so at least on a Mac, you'd need to use something like Automator to generate all of the comparison documents I think.

Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Anonymous
Not applicable
I believe that's exactly what he/she was looking for!
Rob
Graphisoft
Graphisoft
yes, it is actually sold and developed by Vico Software now...

http://www.vicosoftware.com/
::rk