Export marked-up PDFs

When it is time to send marked-up sheets to a GC, Plan Markup exports a copy of the plan with your markups on it. The original PDF is never modified, ever. Your markups live in a sidecar file, and export is the moment they get baked into a new PDF.

You choose between two flavors, depending on who is receiving it.

Flattened copy

The markups become part of the page itself: not annotations, just ink. Whoever opens it sees exactly what you drew and cannot select, move, restyle, or delete any of it.

Use this when the markup is the message: scope clarifications going out with a bid, a marked plan for the field, anything where you want what you drew to stay exactly what you drew. It is the safe default for sending outside the company.

Editable annotations

The markups export as real PDF annotations. Open the file in Bluebeam Revu or Acrobat and the markups are live objects: the other side can select them, restyle them, move them, delete them, and add their own. Revision clouds come through as proper cloud annotations, and measurements come through as dimension-style annotations, so they behave like native markups in Bluebeam rather than dumb shapes.

Use this when you are collaborating with a Bluebeam or Acrobat shop and they need to work on top of your markups rather than just read them.

In the browser

The web app exports too: the Export PDF button downloads a flattened copy named like plan (marked up).pdf. The editable-annotation flavor is Mac-only today.

One-way street

Interop runs export-side only. Plan Markup writes annotations other tools can edit, but it does not read annotations back out of a PDF. Your sidecar file stays the single source of truth for your markups. If someone edits the exported file in Bluebeam, those edits live in their file, not in your takeoff. See Limitations and roadmap.

Rotated sheets

Both export flavors handle rotated pages correctly. Plan sets full of landscape sheets, rotated scans, and mixed orientations export with markups exactly where you drew them. This sounds like table stakes until you have met a tool that gets it wrong.

What export does not change

• Your original PDF stays untouched, byte for byte.
• Your sidecar file stays where it was, still driving the live markups in the app.
• Exporting again after more markup work just writes a fresh copy.

For the numbers rather than the pictures, the takeoff panel’s CSV export is the companion to this. See Measure and takeoff.