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Redline

A guided tour

Ten minutes with the real application — the workspace, drawing your first markup, and getting a calibrated quantity out of a drawing.

Every screenshot on this page is of the running application, captured by driving it the way the text describes.

The window#

The Redline workspace with a document open
A PDF open in Redline, with the Pages panel docked beside it. The rails on both sides are panels and tools; the strip along the foot is the Markups List.
  1. Menu bar — File, Edit, Document, View, Tools, Automate, Window. Automate is where the batch operations live.
  2. Undo and redo — every change in the application goes through one command bus, so these cover all of it uniformly.
  3. Workspace controls, top right — the layout preset, the theme, and the profile. A profile is a saved arrangement: a takeoff estimator and a reviewer want different windows.
  4. Quick properties bar — the armed tool and its style: line colour, width, dash pattern, opacity, fill. Change it here and the next markup you draw uses it.
  5. Panel rail, down the left edge — Pages, Bookmarks, Layers, Folder, Properties, Measurements, History, Takeoff Hanger, Stamps. Click one to open it; click the one already in front to close it.
  6. The open panel — here Pages, showing every sheet as a thumbnail with its label. This is where you reorder, rotate, insert, extract and delete pages. Every panel docks, tabs, floats and closes.
  7. Document tab — Redline is multi-document; several PDFs can be open at once, and two panes can show the same one.
  8. The sheet — the page raster, with the markup and interaction layers stacked over it.
  9. Tool rail, down the right edge — select, text, pan, zoom, and the draw and measure tools.
  10. Markups List, along the foot — every markup as a row. Drag its top edge to give it more or less room; for takeoff work this is the primary surface, not a secondary one.
  11. Status bar — page navigation, zoom, and the scale. It reads Uncalibrated until the page has one, which is the first thing to fix on a drawing you intend to measure.

Drawing a markup#

Press R for the rectangle tool and drag one out. Bare letters arm draw tools, Shift+letter arms measurement tools, and Esc always returns you to Select.

A rectangle markup, selected
The markup is drawn and selected: eight resize handles, a rotation grip above it, a row in the Markups List, and the Properties panel showing everything it carries.

The moment it exists it is a row in the Markups List — with its type, subject, author, date, page, colour and status. That list is sortable and groupable, and selecting a row selects the markup on the page.

The Properties panel is the same information as an editor rather than a table: subject, status, layer and comments under General, and stroke colour, width, line style, opacity and fill under Appearance. Anything you change there applies to the selection.

Drag it to move it, drag a handle to resize, drag the grip above it to rotate. Ctrl/Cmd+Z undoes any of that.

Getting a quantity#

A measurement is only meaningful once the page has a scale, so calibration comes first. That is not a formality: a takeoff on the wrong scale is wrong everywhere and looks right.

Open the Measurements panel and choose Calibrate, then pick two points whose real separation you know — a printed dimension string, a door width, a scale bar — and type that length. If the PDF declares its own scale, Redline adopts it, including the precision the drawing was authored at.

A calibrated area measurement with its takeoff row
The page is calibrated at 1" = 10'-0" — see the Measurements panel and the status bar. The area reads 368.29 SF on the sheet, and again in Measurement Properties with its width and height in feet.

Three things changed in that frame:

  • The status bar reads 1" = 10'-0" instead of Uncalibrated, and the Measurements panel names the same scale as a page scale.
  • The measurement carries its own label, and that label recomputes live. Drag a vertex and the number changes with it; change the page scale and every measurement that inherited it follows.
  • Measurement Properties reports the value, the width and height in real units, and — importantly — where the scale came from: from page. A measurement always tells you which calibration it resolved against.

Scale resolves in three tiers — region → page → set — which is what lets one sheet carry a plan at 1/8" and a detail at 1 1/2" without lying about either.

The five things to try next#

  1. Measure a length. Shift+L, then click along a wall. Shift+A for area, Shift+P for perimeter, Shift+C to count.
  2. Add depth. Type a depth into a measurement's row in the Markups List and Volume follows for an area, Wall Area for a perimeter. That is what turns an area into a quantity.
  3. Group the list. Group the Markups List by Subject to get quantities per assembly, or by Space to get them per room.
  4. Save your tool. Style a markup the way you like it, then add it to My Tools in the Takeoff Hanger — applying that entry re-arms the tool with that style.
  5. Send it out. File ▸ Export writes real PDF annotations with appearance streams, so a reviewer in another PDF tool gets objects they can select and edit — not a flattened picture.

Where to go from here#