Weld mapping is a requirement for most fabrication, especially for oil & gas equipment. It is a process of uniquely identifying each individual that make up an assembly. Some equipment may have several thousand welds. The callout tool as it is in Bluebeam currently, can achieve the goal but only in a manner that is so time consuming and inefficient that it insights you to throw your computer out a window. THIS IS A VERY COMMON ACTIVITY FOR MANY BLUEBEAM USERS AND WOULD BE A VALUEABLE ADDITION TO THE FEATURE SET!
To do this efficiently, I need a callout tool that will allow me to place the leader, as done with the current callout tool (click callout location, then click for the location you would like to place the associated textbox), maintain the textbox per my design with pre-populated text of my choosing, and to allow sequencing as it functions now allowing prefixes/suffixes (often welds may be identified as BW1, BW2…or F1, F2…etc).
Currently, I can build a callout tool that looks exactly like I want it. I can save that tool to my toolbox, but the options for using it from there are what makes the process too cumbersome. One option is drawing mode which forces me to replicate the callout tool EXACTLY as I did when I saved it to the toolbox. The problem with this approach is that the leader (arrows pointing from the textbox to the weld location), are locked. This forces too many steps to correct when placing thousands of these callouts over dozens of isometric drawings. The second option is to place in properties mode which allows proper leader functionality but loses the textbox & text, again resulting in too many steps for the use case.
Below is an example of the type of callout I need:
