Marking Up Visio Drawings

In technical drawing checking or reviewing drawings is often called redlining. This is because traditionally, a senior drafter, engineer or architect would review drawings and markup errors and omissions using a red pen.

Electronic documents also require checking. Working with an electronic document gives us a perfect opportunity to isolate the markup line work from the underlying line work it refers to.

Keeping redlining and revision comments separate to, but synchronized with the original drawing makes a lot of sense...

• Redlining is usually done quickly and with just enough accuraccy to convey the idea
• Redlined details are not always final
• The original drawing should not be altered in any way by the reviewer

Redlined markups are easily isolated in Visio drawings by creating a separate layer for this purpose. Here's how it's done...

• In the drawing to be checked select  View > Layer Properties to display the control box shown above
• Click New and type a layer name (say, Redline) the click OK
• Select the Redline layer and click the Active column. Also select a color in the Layer Color dropdown box.
• Select each other layer and click in the Lock column to prevent shapes being added, removed or moved on these layers. Unfortunately you need to do this for each layer one at a time.

The drawing is now ready to be sent out for markup.

You can turn off the display of any or all markup layers at any time and toggle whether or not they print. All from the Layer Properties box.

Tips
Include standard redline layer(s) in your template drawings.

If several reviewers need to check drawings, provide a different markup layer for each, and differentiate with different layer colors.