Placing Electrical Symbols on a PDF

[Nick Domeier]

I have a seemingly fairly simple request but I keep struggling to find an answer. I just want the ability to place residential electrical symbols onto PDF documents to have more professional looking mark ups to give to my installers or show to customers when creating a proposal. Having a small text box near by or the ability to draw lines for circuitry would be nice but not necessary.

No need for the ability to do take offs or create estimates (I'm open to suggestions that give these options, but not needed) Just wanting to do better than colored pens and highlighters.

Thanks in advance for any help guys.

 

[LarryFine]

Welcome to the forum.

If you want to work on paper, you need a custom ink-pad stamp set.

On a computer, you need a drawing program and imported images.

 

[MCosentino87]

I use Bluebeam Revu with an electrical toolset loaded in for marking up drawings at my job.

 

[Elect117]

If you put it in a power point they have some simple symbols you can use. Not electrical symbols specifically, but still some decent arrows and stuff.

 

[Nick Domeier]

I use Bluebeam Revu with an electrical toolset loaded in for marking up drawings at my job.

I looked at Bluebeam, went through the free trial and some of the trainings. Seemed great for making notes on drawings and things of that nature but overall it was more than I needed. I didn't find the electrical tool set during my trial period so I'll dig into that further.

 

[LarryFine]

You can also crop and lift symbols from images.

 

[Strathead]

You can also crop and lift symbols from images.

I use PDF Xchange by Tracker. the "problem" with cropping and lifting is twofold, usually there is surrounding or extending components like an attaching conduit routing or a wall, and when placing, the crop isn't transparent and since cropping is generally rectangular the cut symbol can overlap parts of the plan. With Xchange, you can create "stamps". I little limited, because once created, you can say change color or add to or subtract from but you can make them larger or smaller. If you go this route, Set the paper to showing graph and draw large, then just shrink it down.

 

[Todd0x1]

inkscape is free. you can acquire yourself a library of the symbols you need, open the pdf in inkscape add what you need and save it as a new pdf