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Annotations on Documents
Annotations on Documents

Using annotations tools, redlining, comment documents in Issues

Julien Benoit avatar
Written by Julien Benoit
Updated over a week ago

New in Catenda Hub is our comprehensive annotation feature. The feature brings the power of our issue management system to Documents, so that Catenda Hub users can enjoy precise commenting, showing where documents and drawings need change and additional information, just like you do using models and viewpoints today.

This article contains information about the following topics:

Annotation toolbar

Annotation tools have been added to our document viewer:

You can draw freehand, add shapes, text and call-outs, highlight text and measurements.

Your annotations can be saved to an issue using our issue management. Either save to an existing issue or create a new issue. The issue can then be assigned to a team or person to change the document or provide an answer to the annotations.

Projects can set up RFI (Request for Information) and similar workflows using issue types and issue boards.

The annotations are attached to the document revision they were drawn on, so new revisions will be pristine, while annotations made on older revisions will be accessible by cycling back through revisions or by going to the document's related issues.

Saving annotations

There are two ways of saving annotations.

The first way is that, when you make an annotation on Catenda Hub, it can be stored in the comment of a topic with some commented text.

The second is "Saving as" with the document preview settings.

Adding annotations to topics

To add annotations to a topic,

  1. Open a single document in the viewer and start using the annotation tools.

  2. Save your annotations using the Annotations panel on the right. Select an existing issue or create a new one and submit your annotations to the issue.

  3. Your annotations are saved grouped as one comment per page of the document.

  4. To use measurements and areas, first calibrate the drawing scale.

Issues containing annotations are added to the document's list of related issues. You'll find these under the File info tab in the right panel.

In order to save this commented text you can export the topic to BCF, PDF or Excel.

The report will contain the comment text as well as a link to the document and a screenshot of where the annotation is in the document.

Note: With the Excel export you only get the topic comment content and not the screenshot.

Saving documents with annotations

Towards the top left any PDF document you will find a hamburger menu with three lines.

If you click this menu you can click Save as.

Clicking on Save As will open the following dialogue:

File name - Specify what you would like your file to be called

File type - PDF or PNG

Page Range - All, Current Page, Specify Page

Include Annotations

The annotation option will let you save the documents with any rectangle annotations/text/note annotations but will not contain any text.

Include Comments
The annotation comments option will let you save the comments that are contained inside annotations like the note annotation and the highlight annotation.

Note: You do not get the topic comment text as part of the downloaded document this way only the comment that is part of the annotation.

Uploading documents with annotations

Later on, documents with annotations like these, can be uploaded.
You will also see the notes of documents that are uploaded.

File types that can be annotated

You can now annotate all document formats that our viewer handles (pdf, doc, docx, xlsx, pptx, dwg and dgn).

Full screen annotations

We have also improved the full screen mode so that annotations can be added while viewing documents in full screen.

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