Feature Highlight: Spot revisions fast with Overlay Pages

enorris

Got a new revision of a drawing and need to know what actually changed? Flipping back and forth between two PDFs and squinting at the differences is slow, and it’s easy to miss something. 

Overlay Pages stacks two or more drawings into a single PDF and shows each one in its own color, so changes jump out right away. 

➡️ Here’s how: 

Go to Document > Overlay Pages. 

The PDF you have open is already listed. Select Add Files to bring in the revised drawing, or select Add Open Files to add every file you have open. 

Choose an alignment method: Page Align (stacks the pages directly), Auto Align (Revu finds the alignment points for you, which works best when the drawings differ in size or scale), or Manual Align (you pick three anchor points yourself). 

Select OK. Revu opens a new PDF named Overlay with each drawing on its own colored layer. 

Bonus: Only care about one part of the sheet? Select a file in the dialog, choose Edit Layer > Select Region, and overlay just that area. 

➡️ Helpful article: Align PDFs with Overlay Pages 

➡️ Watch this BBU video on Overlay Pages for a quick refresher.
 
👇 Share below! 

Do you reach for Overlay Pages or Compare Documents first when a new revision comes in? 

What’s the sneakiest change an overlay has ever caught for you? 

MarcosDTS

I just found the Overlay Documents feature while trying to export/import markups between documents that had different sizing.

The overlap with Auto Align worked great, but importing my markups after the alignment still did not size them appropriately.

I ended up looking at the Document Properties of the larger document, then modifying the Page Setup of the smaller document to increase its dimensions to match. Then, I was able to import the .bax file and the markups were sized as desired.

Overlay is a little easier to use because it allows you to add open tabs, but it might be nice if it added all currently open tabs by default. I had two tabs open but it only added one by default. This is already smoother than the "Compare Documents" feature though, which appears to ignore open tabs entirely.

Looking at the output of Overlay, it seems like it is getting confused. It's showing things that are the same between two documents as if they are different. Not useful.

Looking at the output of Compare Documents, oops it didn't go to the same directory as the inputs by default, I really like how it synchronizes zoom levels between old/diff pages. However, the output was overly broad, with lots of highlighted area that appeared identical to my eye.