create multiple area markups automatically for space planning. For instance, All the area data is stored in Excel, such as room name, area, so we’d like the ability to import it into Bluebeam through XML or another compatible format.
Is the ask if you can run a script so a series of markups (Sketch by….) appear somewhere on your document based on a program file?
Kind of like that. One workflow might be like this: convert excel data (names, areas) to .XML format, then import it into bluebeam so that a list of markups (area meaurement) can be created automatically. Because we have hundreds and thousands of area markups that need to be created, so we are thinking to make them automatically, then planners can just move/edit them easily.
How about this. Create a PDF with all of the markups on it and copy it into each new document. Copy and paste each needed markup into your main document then delete the markups page.
Thanks. the first part of your comment ' create a PDF with all of the markups" is what I want to automate.
Automating bax creation is possible but far from easy. Here's some insights I gained while trying to automate creation of Tool Chest items that might be of interest. 1. BAX files are XML so let's take a look at the BAX for a document with two very simple area measurements - 1m x 1m squares named 'red' and 'blue' next to each other at the top of a single letter sized page. Things start off pretty simple at the top level: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><Document Version="1"> <Page Index="0"> <Label>1</Label> <Width>595.2756</Width> <Height>841.8895</Height> <Annotation> </Annotation> <Annotation> </Annotation> </Page> </Document> Each page of the document will have its own Page Index (starting at 0) with Label (in this case the default '1') and dimensions expressed in points. Under that we have two annotation entries which represent the two markups on our page. Let's crack one of them open: <Annotation> <Page>1</Page> <Contents /> <ModDate>2025-11-26T10:46:24.0000000Z</ModDate> <Color>#FF0000</Color> <Type>Square</Type> <ID>QKGCFIKDRTWBCKNN</ID> <TypeInternal>Bluebeam.PDF.Annotations.AnnotationSquare</TypeInternal> <Raw>789c858ecd0a824014855f6576eac2b977c6719a425ca818250aa9d0425c58ccc2c83451a8b7ef07825ab5389bf31df88ee7411e55485df2951a4add0d41d0df2afb5529e650140e235c5125a49044094e1db594cfa5b96d3b0bc2513753db5fa266d266b4e2c85dc6b8642884bbb05119888605c57c3899c179d61664a9b94bd661bc49a2bcdc076192656f3edd070dc5756e460db93e4eff1fc44440583182046b487fe5928b8fdcf71f7e023a58</Raw> <Index>0</Index> <Custom /> <Subject>Red</Subject> <CreationDate>2025-11-26T10:44:57.0000000Z</CreationDate> <Author>Jim</Author> </Annotation> Most of this makes sense: it's named 'Red' and is also colored red ( #FF0000 is RGB red in hexadecimal) , It was created and last edited this morning and I'm the author. Let's talk about the two weird looking ones: <ID> and <Raw>: Buckle up. Each markup has an ID consisting of 16 random upper case letters. Why? So each markup has a unique value regardless of what document it appears in or who created it. Technically, it's possible two different markups out there could have the same ID but with 43 septillion possible combinations (5.3 billion for every person on the planet) it's pretty unlikely. If i send you a document with markups this is why you can import it without conflicts with your existing document. <Raw> is not unique but it is encoded with zlib compression to reduce the size of the contents. We can tell it's zlib data because of the the 789c at the beginning of the stream so let's decompress it see what's inside. <</RD[0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5]/TempBBox[-0.5 813.0431 28.84646 842.3896]/F 4/C[1 0 0]/M(D:20251126104624-08'00')>> Postscript data… Postscript is the page description language used by PDFs to store page layout data about its contents. It's been around since the days of disco and really doesn't care if you can't understand it because you're not hardware. Since we've made it this far let's pretend we're a printer and break out the contents by line: << /RD[0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5] /TempBBox[-0.5 813.0431 28.84646 842.3896] /F 4 /C[1 0 0] /M(D:20251126104624-08'00') >> /RD = Rectangle differences (how much padding space between the object and the bounding box) /TempBBBox = temporary bounding box data used by Bluebeam. /F is for flag 4 means it should be printed /C is for color (RGB red expressed in decimal) /M is the date Okay, if you made it this far you now have some understanding of what's inside a BAX file. This is an extremely basic example but it demonstrates a few things beyond a text editor you need for working with markups in a bax file: 1. random strings of 16 letters 2. tools for encoding/decoding plain text using zlib 3. a basic understanding of post script Thankfully, you can vibe code your way through a lot of this with AI these days because Bluebeam doesn't provide much public information about what's happening under the hood of a PDF. I wrote a utility to generate simple markups from an Excel spreadsheet and came to the conclusion that creating several hundred markups manually would be faster and less frustrating than trying to generate them with code exactly the way I wanted. Life's short and has lots of other rabbit holes to run down. As I said at the start, possible but not easy. The good news is that this is the sort of task Revu Max is going to be awesome at next year. Even first version out of the gate it's already able to edit markups in ways that inspire jealous awe in me. Wait it out if you can.
Thanks Jim. That make sense. Hope Bluebeam can make something for this, but for now manually creating markups might be the best choice as you mentioned.
@Bing Li seems like quite the challenge!
A couple of ideas that might spark conversation and workflow that is more efficient than starting from scratch with every markup…
My approach to custom tools is to start with the end in mind. In this case it sounds as if you need all of the information that you have in your data table.
I think I'd start with creating custom columns with each of the column headers that you need. Could be Room Number, Floor Number, Room Type, Etc.
If you'd rather not re-type all of that data for each markup you could then create drop downs for each column as CSV files and then upload them as choice values. I've only just dipped my toes into this, but I believe you would need a separate CSV file for each choice column. I think you should be able to extract this from your current CSV file relatively easily.
Then, as you create your markups you simply draw the shape of the room and select the values from the drop downs for that room. I'd expect that you will find that you have some repetition with some of your markups - bathrooms for example might have all of the same data except the room number. In that case save a "bathroom" markup as a tool that has those "standard" choices already made and then change the room number as needed.
Please show us more of your workflow as you progress.
Hope this helps 😎
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