It shows up almost inevitably while you balloon: the place where the drawing itself is wrong. A dimension that contradicts another. A tolerance that is missing. A datum letter that exists nowhere. Whoever inspects reads a drawing more closely than almost anyone else in the building — and therefore finds errors nobody has seen before.
The question is how to tell the design office. The usual route is surprisingly analogue: print the drawing, mark it up with a red pen, scan it back in, send it by email. That is exactly what the drawing markup toolbox in DrawingStamp Pro is for.
Markup belongs on its own layer
The most important point is one you cannot see: markup sits on a separate layer, kept apart from the inspection balloons. That sounds like an internal matter of the software, but it decides whether the result is usable at all. A struck-through dimension is not an inspection characteristic. A revision cloud does not belong in the characteristic list. If both went into the same pot, the inspection plan would end up with a number that can never have a measured value.
Keeping them apart leaves the numbered characteristic list clean while the notes for the design office sit on the same drawing. Both end up together in the exported PDF — nobody has to separate them afterwards.
The tools speak the language of the drawing
Any viewer can put annotations into a PDF. The difference is vocabulary. A general-purpose tool offers an arrow, a box and a text field — but engineering drawings speak in symbols, and you do not want to suggest those with a shaky freehand squiggle. So there are a good dozen tools here, and most of them come straight out of the drawing standard:
- Geometric tolerance frames (GD&T) — with the matching symbol, exactly as it would appear on the drawing.
- Datum symbol, where the datum is missing or wrongly named.
- Surface texture symbol to ISO 1302 in its three variants — basic symbol, material removal required, material removal not permitted.
- Theoretically exact dimension, the boxed value that positional tolerancing calls for.
- Envelope requirement as a symbol rather than a footnote.
- Dimension arrow — a line with arrowheads at both ends and the dimension text above it, for the dimension the drawing simply lacks.
- Information stamp for the frame that records inspector, date or revision status.
Plus the everyday ones: strike-through, free text, arrows and leader lines, circle, rectangle, ellipse, line, freehand, revision cloud and numbered balloons. Everything draws in red by default — the colour everyone reads correctly in this context; colour, line weight and opacity can be changed per annotation, for instance to shade an area semi-transparently instead of covering it up.
What this looks like in daily work
A wrong dimension is struck through and the correct value added beside it as free text. A whole area that needs reworking gets a revision cloud. A query hangs on a leader line and points precisely at the spot in question. Misdrawn? Ctrl + Z takes the last step back, Ctrl + Y brings it forward again.
What you end up with is a PDF that shows two things at once: the inspected, numbered drawing — and, in red on top of it, what stands out about it. The printout, the red pen and the scanner are gone; the markup stays sharp, movable and editable instead of ending up as pixel scribbles in a scan.
Grown out of practice
This toolbox was not devised at a desk. Which symbols are genuinely needed — and which can be done without — emerged from the exchange with users; our partner RED-Drawing helped particularly here. The box keeps growing: if a symbol is missing while you inspect and you would have to draw it by hand, that is a good reason to send us a message.
Try it
Drawing markup is part of the application, not an add-on module — anyone using DrawingStamp Pro in the beta test already has it. An overview of the remaining feature set is on the page ballooning drawings.