Marking up & revising drawings
Marking up of drawings prior to issue is a common (and highly recommended) practice: it is usually carried out by the design team leader (or yourself, if you're a one-person operation), either in VectorWorks or in hard copy. Knowing how to mark up a drawing yourself is a good preparation for this. Essentially, it involves using two tools: the Revision Cloud, and the Callout (to explain the deficiency). NOTE: Marking up is done in the Annotations part of each viewport – not in the Design Layers! It is best carried out in a special Class which is set to have no fill (so the revision cloud doesn't obscure the item it's highlighting) and a thickish (0.35) lineweight of a bright red colour, to help it stand out. It's also a good idea to pre-set your Text to a fairly large font size (18pt) and perhaps in italics, to help distinguish it from the existing annotation on the drawing.
First, create a special Class for markups.
Name it Revision-Markup or some such. I recommend:
A space at the start of the Class name: this forces it to the top of the Classes list, for easy access.
Turn on Use at Creation, to ensure these attributes apply to all markup items.
Set the Fill Style to None
Pen colour to bright red
Line thickness 0.35.
Customize Cloud Properties
Choose the Revision Cloud tool
In the Dims/Notes toolset...
Choose the Revision Cloud tool
Customize its settings by clicking its Preferences…
– and changing the defaults: I find that a Small Billow Size, and a small (Low) Variability in the their shape produces the best results.
Mark up anything that needs revision or improvement.
With Revision-Markup as your Active Class, go into the Annotations part of each viewport and mark up anything that needs correction, revision, adding to, etc., adding annotation of your own to explain what is needed. This includes items such as:
Insufficient or lacking information about a given fixture or design feature
Drawing label information is wrong, and/or its lineweight too thin or too thick (should be 0.13 or 0.18 – best achieved by assigning to suitable annotation Class)
Door swing showing in a ceiling plan (due to the Sills class being turned on in that viewport).
Furniture or other classes which shouldn't be in the viewport showing when they shouldn't.
Things to look out for in the titleblock
Since the titleblock isn't a viewport, this markup you carry out on the sheet itself, not inside any viewport. Look out for things such as:
Titleblock lines too thin or too thick: outer boundary should be 0.35 or 0.50; inner lines should be 0.13 or 0.18 (but not 0.05)
Dwg Title wrong, doesn't correspond to Sheet title, or set to a text that is not large or bold enough to stand out (ditto the Dwg. No.)
Proj. No. wrong (should be 1105)
"Drawn by" or "Checked by" initials wrong: "Dwn by" should be the person who drafted, "Chkd by" should be your initials
Text values not aligned with each other.
In preparation for the first revision, place a Sheet Border
– if you haven't done so already. This will give us a consistent position for the titleblock, and also provide for an automated Revision List once we have started revising the drawing. As usual with the Sheet Border tool, just double-click with it anywhere in the drawing: you don't have to worry about placement, since by default, it sizes itself automatically to the sheet size, and centred on it.
Change Sheet Border margins
Reduce the default 0.75" to 0.25".
Make a Class for the actual revisions.
Make it as a duplicate of Revision-Markup class, only set its Pen colour to blue.
Note each revision with a Revision Marker.
Using the new Revision-# Class as your Active Class, choose the Revision Marker tool [1] and double-click next to where you're making the revision [2]. The first time you do so, it will call up the Revision Marker Preferences [3], where you type in the Revision Number and your preferred Scale. NOTE: Change the scale only if you think that the marker at its default, "1" scale is too small. The Revision Number refers to the current round of revisions (Round #1, Round #2, etc.) – not to the individual revision marker, so all the current batch of markers have the number 1. You can then remove the Revision Cloud.
Replace each Revision Cloud with a Revision marker
As you fix each issue (regardless of whether it was clouded or not!), place a little Revision triangle next to it.
Record the current round of revisions for posterity
Select the Sheet Border object and turn on Use Revision Block [1]
The Revision History list appears at the top right of the drawing.
NOTE: If it's too wide in your drawing – interfering with objects on the sheet – you can vary its width (and height)
Click Add… to add information about this current round of revisions
Type in the description.
The date is entered for you automatically
Don't enter anything in Approved (until it's been approved by your supervisor), or Zone (not relevant now)
Enter a description of what kind of revisions you've made.
It gets added to the list in the dialog...
... - and on the drawing