Do a Job · Everyday · 6 min
Read the sheet numbers, titles and revisions
Read each sheet's own title block into a register of the set, and check it for duplicates and gaps.
Most jobs keep a drawing register by hand, and it’s wrong by the second revision. The information is already on the sheets. DatoMark reads it from the sheet's own text, checks the set as a whole (two sheets with one number, or a sheet with none), and exports the list.
A single sheet
- Choose Read the title block… from the Application commands (find it with Ctrl+F).
- It shows what it read, field by field, and how.
- If it couldn’t find the block, drag a box round it when asked. It remembers nothing about your drawing beyond what you confirm.
A whole set
- Choose Sheet index…, then Add PDFs (or add the drawings already open).
- Read the flags in the Check column: duplicates, missing numbers, a file name that disagrees with the sheet.
- If some sheets didn’t read, choose Scan sheets that didn’t read. It takes a few seconds a sheet and can be stopped between sheets.
- Type over any value that’s wrong. It’s marked as edited and is never overwritten by a later scan.
- Export CSV.
Values come from the sheet itself. The file name is only used as a flag when it disagrees, and never to fill a blank, because the drawing is the source and the file name is secondary.
Scanned title blocks
PDF text, OCR and visual matching
PDF text is text already stored in the file. OCR (optical character recognition) reads letters and numbers from a picture. Visual matching looks for similar shapes or symbols; it isn’t a way of reading drawing references or verifying BIM objects.
Give a page its drawing number
- Open Read the title block…. If the page is a picture, choose Scan title block (OCR); use Choose the area… if it reads the wrong place.
- Check the Drawing number field against the sheet. Correct any characters, including zeros and the letter O. A BIM-style drawing code is still a printed reference, not verified model data.
- Look at the preview below the field, for example Page 3 → A-103, then choose Use as drawing number.
- Find the sheet by that reference in Contents. Take-off workings from the sheet can cite the drawing number while retaining its source page.
A scanned sheet has no text to read, so the title block is read from its picture on this computer (nothing is uploaded). It’s slower and can slip on small print, so scanned rows say so in the Read by column and are worth a glance.
In DatoMark Open the sheet index