Suggestion to Bluebeam: Enhancing OCR Capabilities for Handwritten Content

Calvin Chan · 2025-04-01T06:52:16+00:00

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Bluebeam's OCR feature for scanned design and construction drawings has proven to be a powerful tool for professionals in the AEC industry. However, I’ve noticed a significant limitation when it comes to recognizing handwritten notes or annotations on these drawings. Currently, the technology struggles to accurately interpret handwritten content, which is often present in older or manually marked-up documents.

Recently, I experimented with some OCR + AI tools that specialize in recognizing handwritten text, and the results were impressive. These tools demonstrated the potential to accurately extract handwritten information from drawings, which could be a game-changer for workflows involving legacy documents or manual annotations.

I believe integrating advanced AI-powered handwriting recognition into Bluebeam could further elevate its capabilities and provide immense value to users. This enhancement would ensure a more seamless and efficient process for digitizing and utilizing all aspects of scanned drawings, including handwritten content.

Looking forward to seeing how Bluebeam continues to innovate!

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Comments

bcostlow

Absolutely on-board with this one. My team is almost exclusively dedicated to new builds, but we work closely with the service department and remodeling department, both of which deal much more frequently with handwritten components. I think they would greatly benefit from this upgrade to OCR. Also, I've not really worked with those overlays but boy does that yellow make the darker lines just POP!

Shaya Birnbaum

YES!

I will add, I find that for some reason Architects like to use a computer generated "handwritten" text that messes with the current OCR.

Here is an example from a project I am currently working on: OCR reads every number "1" as the letter "I". AI would for sure be a help here!

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