This has come up a decent amount recently so I thought I would take a look at the best workflow to carry this out.
Contractors often want to produce drawings where you overlay your Model / QA / AS Built data on top of the clients / engineers original drawings. To achieve this you can import the sheets into the plan view and georeference them and then set your view filters that you then use to control the content that is displayed in your Dynaview in the Sheet View.
This works pretty well in general, but sometimes for a large project where you are producing drawings with different overlays each week you may want to lay out the clients drawings in Sheets in a Sheet Set and set up the referencing the same as the clients sheet referencing so that you can easily create overlays using different Dynaviews and Different View Filters for each piece of work that you deliver.
To get PDF Sheets laid out as images in the Sheet View is a little bit of a trick - this is how you do it
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Create a New Project and save the Project with a Project Name. The Project now has a project Folder into which the images of the PDF Pages are created as PNG files at the resolution you define in (2).
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Import the PDF Pages as if you were going to Georeference them into the Plan View of the Project. During the import process you set the pages you want to import e.g. Pages 6-10, and the DPI of the pages that you want the resolution to be after import e.g. 600DPI. The DPI is a really important value to remember - it is in the name of the images that get created as PNG files in the Project Folder.
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Now create the Sheet Set for the Paper Size that the Client Drawings are created on - you can find that information in the Document Properties in Adobe Acrobat or your preferred PDF Viewer application e.g. Bluebeam. Now create Custom Sheets for the Sheets that you want to create e.g. If I have Sheets 6 to 10 for the Grading Plans where
Sheet 6 is C 1.30 Site Grading Plan
Sheet 7 is C 1.31 Building G Grading Plan
Sheet 8 is C 1.32 Building H Grading Plan
Sheet 9 is C 1.33 Building E Grading Plan
Sheet 8 is C 1.34 Building F Grading Plan
I would create a Custom Sheet Set at 36x24 paper size and call it C 1.XX - Site Grading Plans
I would create 4 Custom Sheets named C 1.31 - Building G Grading Plan etc. and then set the sort rank in each sheet properties so that they order themselves in the correct order of the Project Explorer
- Now we want to insert the PDF page images on the correct sheets of the sheet set. Open the first Sheet as a new sheet view. Run the Insert Image command to bring the image into that sheet. Select the image to insert and browse for it in the Project Folder for the project. You will need to set the image file type to PNG in this process. The file names of the images tell you which sheet they were and the DPI at which they were imported. Place the image on a layer e.g. SITE - Images and for the scale enter 1/600 if the file was imported at 600 DPI. For the Lower Corner you want 0,0.
Note
The PDF pages are converted to images using the DPI setting that you defined. If your sheet size is 36x24 then the image size in pixels is 36x600 and 24x600 pixels. The Insert Image scale if you enter 1 will bring the image in 600x too large, that is why we enter 1/600 for the scale.
Repeat Step 4 for each image of a PDF Page that you imported.
Video shows you how