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Getting started

Opening a drawing set, marking it up, and getting a calibrated measurement out of it in the first ten minutes.

Opening a document#

File ▸ Open takes a PDF or an .amed file. The Folder panel gives you the same thing three ways: Recent Files (the same list as File ▸ Open Recent), an Explorer for browsing local folders, and File Exchange, which is listed disabled with its reason.

File ▸ Reopen N Files from Last Session restores everything that was open between one launch and the next, on the page you left it on. A session is not the recents list: recents is a rolling list of individual opens, a session is everything open at once, restored as it was. Files that have moved are reported rather than silently skipped.

Redline is multi-document. Several PDFs can be open at once, and the workspace can be arranged single, side-by-side, stacked, three-up, quad or 3×3.

Your first markup#

Press R for the rectangle tool and drag one out. Then:

  • Esc or V returns to the Select tool.
  • Click the rectangle to select it. Drag it to move, drag a corner handle to resize, drag the rotation grip to rotate.
  • The Properties panel edits its colour, fill, line style, dash scale and opacity.
  • Ctrl/Cmd+Z undoes. Everything goes through one command bus, so undo covers every change uniformly.

Bare letters activate draw tools, Shift+letter activates measurement tools, Ctrl/Cmd is for edit and file operations, and Alt (Linux/Windows) or Ctrl (macOS) is for viewport navigation. The whole map is in Keyboard reference.

Your first measurement#

A measurement is only meaningful once the page has a scale, so calibration comes first.

1. Calibrate. Open the Measurements panel and choose Calibrate. Pick two points on something whose real length you know — a printed dimension string, a door width, a scale bar — and type that length. If the drawing already declares its scale in the file, Redline adopts it, including the precision the drawing was authored at.

2. Measure. Press Shift+L for Length and click along a wall. The label recomputes live as you drag. Shift+A measures area, Shift+P perimeter, Shift+C counts.

3. Read the totals. The Markups List at the foot of the window shows every markup as a row, with takeoff columns — Measurement, Length, Area, Count, Unit, Depth, Volume, Wall Area, Rise-Drop, Slope. Sort, group and subtotal there.

Scale is a cascade: a region scale beats a page scale, which beats a set scale. That is what lets one sheet carry a plan at 1/8" and a detail at 1 1/2" without lying about either.

Getting it back out#

File ▸ Save writes .amed, which keeps every markup live and editable, plus the document.

File ▸ Export writes a PDF. By default your markups go out as real PDF annotations with appearance streams, so a reviewer in another PDF tool can select and edit them. settings.pdfMarkupOutput chooses between annotations (the default), content (flattened into the page), or both.

File ▸ Print (Ctrl/Cmd+P) opens a dialog whose preview renders the composed bytes — so it cannot lie about scale, range, or what a layer contributed. Scaling defaults to actual size (1:1), not fit: every other PDF application defaults to fit, which on a scaled construction drawing silently makes every printed dimension wrong.

Next steps#