Fix problems with Text Search

- [Instructor] Hello, and welcome back to Bluebeam Tips and Tricks. In this episode, I want to talk to you about what you can do when Bluebeam's Text Search feature just doesn't seem to be working. For example, here on this construction drawing, I see the words Second Floor Demo Plan, First Floor Demo Plan, Demo Notes, and if I zoom in, I see the words demo over and over again. Yet if I click here in the left menu to open the Search feature, and I make sure that I'm choosing a text search and I type the word Demo, click on Search, I get nothing.

See down here at the bottom of the screen, zero results found in this document. How can that be, it says demo over and over again. Let's close the search box. The issue here is that what we're seeing is text is not really text, it's either an AutoCAD font that did not get converted in the process of making this a digital drawing, or this is a drawing that got scanned in and so although it looks like text, it's just not text. Bluebeam is not going to find it.

So we can take care of that as long as you have the eXtreme version of Bluebeam Revu. So you have to have Bluebeam Revu eXtreme in order to find this feature, and it's found under Document, OCR. So if you choose OCR, we're going to go ahead and do the OCR feature which is optical character recognition on this entire set of drawings that I happen to have loaded up. I want it to find English words.

I want to leave most of these selected by default, if you don't have Detect Vertical Text selected by default, make sure that you select that so that text like this over on the right side of the screen, that vertical text gets recognized as well. I want to detect text in pictures and drawings. I don't want to skip any pages, and I want to go ahead and click on OK. Now I'll tell you that depending on how large your file is, this process can take a while. If you've got hundreds of pages in your drawing set, this could be one of those things that you hit Go and then take a lunch break.

In our case here, this is, I think I have five sheets in this sample set of drawings, and it's still going to take a couple of minutes to run through this rendering and text recognition. So we'll let that process proceed and I'll show you what it looks like after this is over. Once our Progress dialog box goes away, it means that that process has been completed, and you won't see any change to your drawing at all, but now when we open the Search menu and we do that same search for the word Demo, it finds all of these instances of the words demo on this plan sheet.

If I click on one of them, it'll highlight where it found it, down here in this case, click on another one, it found the instance of the word demo there. So just like that, your text search problems are fixed by running that feature found under Document, OCR. Just remember, you have to have Bluebeam eXtreme in order to be able to find this feature, but it will fix your text search problems when you have documents that have been scanned in, or you don't have proper fonts embedded in that particular construction drawing.

That's it for this week, stay tuned and we'll look at some more tips and tricks in the next episode.