Document templates
Bid work generates paper beyond the plans: an RFI when a detail does not add up, a cover sheet for a submittal, an RFQ to a supplier. Plan Markup creates these as PDFs from built-in templates, so the routine documents stop being a trip to another program.
The templates
Section titled “The templates”- RFI. A request for information to send when the plans leave a question open.
- Submittal cover. The cover sheet for a submittal package.
- RFQ to supplier. A request for quote to send a supplier or fabricator.
- Transmittal. A record of what you sent, to whom, and when.
- Detail sheet. A blank detail page for sketching your own detail and sending it out.
The templates are trade-neutral. Nothing in them assumes fencing, concrete, or any other division; they are the forms every commercial estimator sends.
Profiles do the typing
Section titled “Profiles do the typing”The repetitive fields fill themselves from two profiles:
- Company profile. Your company’s name and standing details, including your logo, which gets embedded in the generated PDF.
- Project profile. The current job’s information.
Set these up once and a new RFI opens with the letterhead-level content already in place. You fill in the parts that are actually about this RFI: the question, the reference, the specifics.
Generated documents are just sheets
Section titled “Generated documents are just sheets”When you save a generated document, it lands next to the plans as a normal PDF, which means everything else in Plan Markup applies to it:
- Mark it up like any other sheet: cloud the detail in question on your RFI, arrow the dimension you are asking about. See Markup tools.
- Its markups save to a sidecar file like any other sheet, and the generated PDF itself is never modified after creation.
- Export it flattened to send out.
That loop is the point. The old workflow was: notice a problem in your takeoff tool, go write an RFI in Word, screenshot the plan, paste, resize, curse. Here the RFI is born next to the sheet that raised the question, and you cloud the problem directly.
Templates create new PDFs. They do not edit text inside existing PDFs or fill third-party PDF forms; that is out of scope. See Limitations and roadmap.