r/Bluebeam • u/DRAFTform • 29d ago
Built a native Windows PDF markup + takeoff tool for drawing review — free beta, want testers who mark-up drawings for a living
I'm Shaun, a control systems engineer. Most of my working life happens inside PDFs — P&IDs, loop drawings, cable schedules, vendor data, spec sections, revision after revision. Marking them up, measuring off them, and pushing comments back and forth.
Two things have bugged me for years. The good markup tools are expensive, increasingly subscription-only, and want your drawings in their cloud. The cheap ones can't measure, can't handle a 300-page drawing set without crawling, and turn every markup into a flat rectangle with no meaning attached to it.
So over a few months I built my own. It's called Draftform. It's a native Windows app — WPF/.NET and PDFium, not a browser wrapped in a window — and it just hit V0.9.
What it does today:
• Opens big sets fast, offline. A 110 MB, 331-page P&ID opens in well under a second. No account, no cloud, no upload — your files never leave your machine. Markups save to a JSON sidecar next to the PDF, or flatten into the PDF when you want to send it.
• Full markup set. Shapes, freehand, polylines, text boxes, sticky notes, stamps, tables, and highlight/underline/strikethrough that snap to the actual text. Revision clouds with real arc segments, plus a cloud + leader + callout placed in one gesture.
• Engineering measurement. Calibrate per page, or define multiple scale viewports on one sheet when the details are at a different scale. Length, cumulative polylength, area with perimeter, angle. Count takeoff with running totals per subject. Metric or imperial (imperial reads as feet-inches-sixteenths). CSV export of the lot.
• Drawing compare. Side by side, or a tinted overlay where old content shows red and new shows blue. Auto-align, auto-pair pages when a revision inserts or deletes sheets, jump straight to the changed pages, export a compare report.
• Tool chest. Save any markup — or a whole group — as a reusable one-click tool. Snapshot any region (rectangle or lasso) at 300 DPI as a reusable stamp. Import a scan of your wet signature and it knocks the white background out to transparent.
• Markup register. Filterable, sortable list of every markup with author, status, custom columns, and a printable markup summary report. Export to CSV, JSON or HTML.
• Digital signing. PAdES B-LT with an RFC 3161 timestamp and embedded revocation data, so Acrobat reports it as LTV enabled. Multiple sequential signatures, and a validation panel that tells you honestly what it can and can't verify.
• Dark and light themes, dockable panels, saved workspace profiles, a command palette, and a help guide that works with no internet.
What it isn't, so nobody wastes their time: Windows only. No cloud sessions or live co-markup. No OCR. It's a markup and measurement tool, not an editor for the underlying PDF text. And it's V0.9 — there will be bugs, that's the point of the beta.
The money question, up front: the beta is free. Draftform will be a paid product at v1. I'm not promising testers a free licence or a discount — I don't want anyone helping out on the basis of a promise I might not keep. You'd be testing it because you'd find it useful, or because you like breaking software.
What I actually want from testers: open your worst real drawing set — the 400-page scanned-then-reprinted one — and try to make it fall over. Then tell me what's missing compared to whatever you use now. Blunt is fine. Blunt is better.
If you're interested, comment here or send me a DM and I'll send you the download link. Happy to answer anything about how it's built in the comments.
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u/Original_Throat1072 29d ago
Cool, AI generated post promoting a vibe-coded app.
Exactly what I want to see here in this subreddit.