From the course: Learning Bluebeam Revu: Version 2018 to Version 20

Using plugins, printing, and converting - Bluebeam Tutorial

From the course: Learning Bluebeam Revu: Version 2018 to Version 20

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Using plugins, printing, and converting

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- [Jim] Besides just being able to work with existing PDF documents, Bluebeam Revu contains a number of different methods for creating new PDF files. In this video, I'll talk about the plugins and converters that Revu includes and installs when you install Bluebeam and these allow you to create PDFs from other software programs. Let's take a look. Quickly navigating over to Bluebeam's support website and searching for plugins brings me to an article that shows me all of the current plugins that should've been installed with Bluebeam Revu. So those include AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT, Revit, Navisworks, SolidWorks, SketchUp Pro and then plugins for the Microsoft Office programs Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Now these plugins will only get installed if you have these existing programs and for the CAD, Navisworks, Revit, SketchUp and SolidWorks plugins, they'll only be installed if you have Bluebeam Revu CAD or Extreme versions. If you just have the standard version, you should only see the Microsoft Office plugins installed. Let's see what those look like. Navigating back to our exercise files, if we open up the exercise files for this chapter, we see that we've got a couple of files here. I want to double click on the Microsoft Word file. Doing that opens up just a standard Word document, but I see that at the top here, I now have a menu tab for Bluebeam that allows me to have some control over the settings and create a Bluebeam PDF. So I'm going to click on create PDF. It's going to ask me to name the resulting document. I'm going to put that in my Documents folder, just leave it named StatementOfWork. You can change the image compression. I'm just going to set that to default and I'm going to leave the rest of the options at their default and click on save. So as I do that, you'll see it quickly run through the conversion process and just like that, we have changed the document from a Word document into a Bluebeam PDF document, or a PDF document, really, that can be opened by any PDF reader. Now along with the plugins, there's also a PDF printer that gets installed when you install Bluebeam Revu. Let's take a look at how that works by navigating back to those exercise files and double clicking. This is just an image file. It's a TIFF image file and when I double click on that, my Windows computer opens up Windows Photo Viewer and there is no plugin for Windows Photo Viewer, but I can still convert this photo or this image file into a PDF by just selecting print and then making sure that I choose the Bluebeam PDF printer that got installed when I installed the software. So I'm going to go ahead and click on print there. Again, a dialog box will open asking me to name it. I'm going to save it in my Documents folder and leave it named Full Page Photo. I'm going to leave all of the rest of the defaults set and click on save. Doing that, you'll see I immediately have my image file converted into a PDF. It is upside down. That's pretty easy to fix in Bluebeam Revu by selecting Document and then rotate pages. In this case, I want to rotate that image 180 degrees. Click on okay and I've got my full-page photo. Used to be a photo format or an image file and now it's converted to a PDF. There is one last way that you can convert image files, in particular. I'm going to go ahead and close that file. I don't need to save it. We're not going to work with that again, but I do want to look at one more built-in way to convert image files and that is just by going to File and then Open. So if I do that and then navigate back to my exercise files, you see it doesn't have anything there when I select the exercise files for chapter three, but if I change this file type that I'm searching for from PDF to image files, I can just double click on the image file there and you'll see it converts it automatically without even having to open it up in another program. That is an image converter that's built into Bluebeam Revu. Converting these files from other formats into the PDF format is really a great way to preserver their layout and their intended look while being able to share the files with other members of your project team. It also preserves the files and allows the PDF version to be used for markups that I'm going to show you later while still preserving the original file in its original format.

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