Specifications on Drawings

[Anonymous]

As a smaller office occasionally we locate our specifications on the drawings. This allows us to make sure that the contractor has all the information he needs in one place. Our office edits specifications in Word. I found that if I make a PDF of the specifications i can place them directly on the layout. I apologize if this is redundant for people but I searched a long time to try and figure this one out so I thought that I should share with the class.

There is a little set up but once it is done updating the information is relatively easy.

1. Format the Word document so that there are no margins and the width that you would like to see on the drawings. 6"x11" works pretty good for me. You can do 6x sheet size but I find that if i want to edit in word sometimes it is nice to print a hard copy out and edit, call me old fashion.

2. Create a PDF of the spec, making sure that all pages are within one document.

3. Place the document on the layout, ArchiCAD will have you place each page separately. Arrange them so that it reads continuously. See attached image for how I did it for a 24"x36" sheet.

4. When you need to make changes to the PDF Just republish with the correct format, the same name, and same location. it will update the pages that you placed on the drawing when you re-open the drawing and update the layout.

[Erich]

Just an FYI...

If you set your page size in Word to something larger, you can reduce the number of imports required. In Pages (a mac program) I can make the page size match the drawing sheet size and only have 1 import on each page. Then you just adjust the number of columns to match what you want to see. In Word I was not able to make this work because my version of Word (older) was limited in how large a page could be but you could match the sheet height and cut your number of imports in half.