How to use Sets to manage large PDFs | Revu 21

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Applies to:

  • Core
  • Complete

Working with very large PDFs (for example, 100 pages or more) can be tedious, especially if you need to look through several at once. They’re often difficult to load, share via email, version control, and search through. Using Sets in Revu solves all of these problems and more.

A Set can load multiple PDFs in Revu as if they were one document. If any revisions are present, they’re automatically grouped with their appropriate pages. Revu can also detect the sheet name and use it to automatically sort the documents by discipline. Since the files are hyperlinked rather than combined, you can load and navigate files quickly. You can organize files in folders. You can also share Sets with your coworkers.

Creating a Set

To create a Set, you will need to open the Sets panel (Alt+2). If the Sets panel doesn’t appear on your screen, you can go to Window > Panels > Sets to activate it.

  1. In the Sets panel, go to Sets > New Set.
  2. Select Add, and select the files or folders you want to include in your Set.
  3. Select OK. Revu will ask you to select the region of your document where your sheet names appear. Select Select, then click and drag around the appropriate area.
  4. Revu will automatically use AutoMark to tag and name these articles, and present a table of the named sheets where you can edit any mistakes from the AutoMark process.

If you’re satisfied with the sheet names, Revu will use these names in the Set.

You can navigate through your files with the Sets panel. If a particular sheet contains any revisions, you can look through them using the arrows just below the thumbnail. Pages with revisions will show additional pages stacked underneath their thumbnail.

Categorizing Sets

To edit how Revu categorizes your PDFs, go to Revu > Preferences > Sets > Categories in the Preferences menu. During the AutoMark process, Revu will attempt to identify which discipline the PDF belongs to based on the letters in the sheet name area (under the Filter column). To change either the discipline name or the letter used to identify a discipline, double click on the row.

Once you set the disciplines, you can browse sheets by discipline to make navigation even easier.

Sharing Sets

You can share Sets with your coworkers, only if they have access to the file paths in the Set. The easiest way to share a Set is to use the following procedure to upload the Set file and accompanying PDFs to a shared network drive:

  1. Create or move a folder containing all of the relevant PDFs in a Set to your network drive.
  2. Create a Set by selecting the files that appear on the network drive.
  3. Go to Sets > Save Set As, then give your Set a name and save it on the network drive. The file will have the .bex file extension.
  4. Once the files are in the correct place, go to Sets > Open Set.
  5. Navigate to the Set file you saved earlier to select it.

If you don’t have a network drive, you can share a Set by compressing the Set as a .zip and sending the compressed file directly to your coworker.

To do this, you’ll need to create a folder that contains the Set file (.bex) and the PDFs in the Set. Make sure that the links in the Set are relative and point to the correct locations within the folder, then send the compressed folder in an email or a file-sharing system.

Even more about Sets

If you ever get stuck, or if you want to try even more Sets features, be sure to check out Sets in the Revu Help Manual.

How-To

PDF Management

Working with large amounts of PDFs can be tedious. Using Sets in Revu can help.

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