Spaces are designed to enable more efficient punch list and back check operations. Set up your drawing with spaces before punching and you'll find it easier to find, sort, and report your punch markups.
Spaces allow you to designate named parts of drawings on an invisible layer. Any markups placed inside a Space can be organized based on the Space they are in.
For example, suppose you have a multiple page drawing where each page represents a floor of a building, and each floor contains many rooms. You can designate a space called "Floor 1" which encompasses the entire first floor, and inside Floor 1 you can define many individual spaces corresponding to the rooms called "Room 1," "Room 2," and so on. After your punch process is complete, the spaces will allow you to easily find and organize all the markups in a particular room or on a particular floor.
Spaces can be nested, but they cannot partially overlap (in other words, the borders of a Space may not touch the border of another Space). Any Space that is contained within another Space will automatically be nested inside it. Existing Spaces can be moved inside other Spaces to nest them.
Spaces can be visible or hidden. You'll want spaces visible while you're setting them up, but afterwards you may want to hide them while still tracking which space various markups are placed in. To do this, toggle Highlight mode off.
On the Spaces tab, click Highlight to toggle visibility on or off. Additionally, when in Edit Spaces mode, Spaces are automatically visible.
Once a Space is placed on the document, it appears in the Spaces tab under the label of the page it is on. From here, you can edit, move, or delete the space.
To alter a Space's shape:
Select the Space by doing either of the following:
On the Spaces tab, click Properties. The Space Properties dialog box appears.
One or more spaces can be cut, copied and pasted to another place in the PDF or to another PDF. Be aware that cutting or copying a Space will also affect its nested Spaces.
To cut, copy and paste Spaces:
Select the Space by doing either of the following:
Select the Space by doing either of the following:
Spaces can be used to create Area markups to minimize the amount of outlining required for a job when both Takeoffs and Spaces are required. An Area markup created from a Space will automatically be placed directly over the Space, but once created, it is separate from the Space and, for example, can be moved independently of the Space or have different Properties.
To create an Area markup from a Space:
Select the Space by doing either of the following:
In many cases spaces will be drawn onto large, sprawling pages. It can be difficult to fit all the punch symbols needed on a space at that scale. Typically this is remedied by taking a snapshot of the area and pasting it onto a separate page (often a punch template page). Spaces provide a fast and easy way to accomplish this.
Navigate to another page, paste the snapshot, then click and drag to resize it. Now you can fit your punch symbols. And, when you use spaces to generate snapshots, the pasted snapshot retains its space definition and space name. This means that, when organizing markups by space, symbols placed in the same space will show up together even if they are on different pages.
To determine whether or not the markups in the space are included in the snapshot, see Snapshot Preferences.
In addition to being able to create a hyperlink to a Space from the Action dialog box, you can create a hyperlink to a Space from the Spaces tab. This method allows you to quickly create a hyperlink to a Space within the same document. This method cannot be used to create a hyperlink to a Space within a different document, however. To do that, create a Hyperlink normally and define it as to the desired Space.
To create a Hyperlink to a Space from the Spaces tab:
The Markups list contains a column called Space. To view this column in your Markups list, click Columns on the Markups list toolbar and select Space. Once visible, click the column heading to sort the Markups list by Space. Click Filter, then click the arrow to the right of the Space column to choose to see markups only in certain spaces.
For more on the Markups list, see the Markups List section.
Space names will automatically appear in PDF Summaries, making it easier to identify from the summary page where a markup is .
See Markup Summary for more information on making summaries.