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High Compliance Environment Help Center

A quick guide to the Online Viewer

This article gives an overview of the ways you can view, review and markup documents using the Online Viewer.

The Online Viewer is used review and markup PDF documents online, and works in all modern browsers (Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Firefox) without requiring any third party plugins (no Java, Flash, Silverlight etc required).

When you select a Workflow to review from the task page, you find yourself in List Mode. 

In List Mode you can:

To access the document-centric functionality, including the viewer and markup tools – click the Document Number link or pencil icon for any of the documents.

Doc Mode

This takes you to the Doc Mode screen where you can review your documents in detail, one at a time.

Doc Mode allows you to see all the important information about the workflow and the document under review in one screen.

Doc Mode – Breakdown of the screen elements

Documents

Shows the documents that are assigned to you for review as part of the workflow. The selected document number is the document that you are currently reviewing.

Supplementary Files

Lower down in the panel you can see Supplementary Files. If any supplementary files have been attached to the workflow they will be listed here. Click on a supplementary file to download it to your computer for viewing.

You can attach additional supplementary files from the List Mode screen while the workflow is in progress.

Workflow Steps

This section is where you enter your review outcome for a step and any summary comments.
It also provides the broader context of the workflow, like which other steps have been completed and what was their outcome, or which steps are yet to be completed.

Your Response is the current step for you to review.

You can submit your review as soon as you finish reviewing each document, or you can send a batch from the list mode screen once they are all complete (useful if the reviewer needs all documents in order to complete the review).

Note: Sending documents one by one creates a separate transmittal for each document and means the next reviewer will receive each document one at a time.

Document navigation

This panel contains optional tools to assist with navigating through multi-page documents. You can choose to navigate by thumbnail, by table of contents (if the document contains one) or via text search if the document contains searchable text.

Document Properties

View document metadata (status, discipline, etc.) of the current document.

 

File Comparison

Compare the current version of your PDF document with any available previous version of the same document.  

Markup Tools

These are the tools which allow you to add markups and comments to your documents.

Select from the available Annotations & Stamps or click More Tools.

Tip!

If you can’t select or highlight text in the PDF then it’s likely that the document is a scan or image based document (literally a picture of text). 

Annotations & Stamps

  • Free Text - Click to add a text comment.
  • Highlight - Highlights the selected text.
  • Note - Create a note marker in the document that links to an extended text entry area off to the side the document in the Notes/Comments panel. Very useful when space on the document is limited and/or the comments you need to add are extensive.
  • Callout - Add a text box with an arrow to highlight the desired area on the document.
  • Arrow - Click to place the arrowhead, then drag out to create the line.
  • Line - Click to start a line, then click again to finish.
  • Cloud- Click for each corner of a polygon cloud shape. Double click to complete the shape.
  • Rectangle - Click and drag out a square or rectangle shape.
  • Ellipse - Click and drag out a circle or oval shape.
  • File Attachment - Attach supported files up to 5MB per save.
  • Signature - create a custom signature and stamp it onto the document.
  • Rubber Stamp - place pre-defined or custom stamps.
  • Dynamic Stamp - stamp your review outcome directly onto the document, including your logo, name and custom disclaimer text.
  • Image Stamp - stamp an image from your computer onto the document.
  • Distance - measure distance between two points.
  • Perimeter - measure perimeter between multiple points.
  • Area - measure area between multiple points.

More Tools

  • Free Hand - draw with the pen tool.
  • Polygon - click multiple points to draw a custom polygon.
  • Polyline - click multiple points to draw a custom line.
  • Underline - Underlines the selected text.
  • Strikeout - Adds a strike-through to the selected text.
  • Squiggly - Underlines the selected text with a squiggly line.

 

Markups can be customised with color and size. You can also set a status against each markup to help you manage them.

Tip!

If you've made changes to text color, size or stroke we'll remember your settings on the next document you review - even when you next login. We'll also check your spelling as you type.

Comments/Notes

Whenever a markup is added – it will be listed in the collapsible Comments/Notes panel. Click the Notes icon to view it.

Here you can also add extra comments, clarifications or questions to someone else’s markups.

 

Comment/Notes Navigation

When reviewing your comments/markups or those of other reviewers, you have several options open to you.

  • Text Search You can search directly within the comments themselves
  • Comment Sorting You can sort them by their position within the document or the order in which they were entered.
  • Comment Markers When dealing with multi page documents to save you from having to scroll through each and every page to find them, there is a small blue line visible in the notes comment panel for every markup in the document. Click one of those blue lines to navigate directly to that markup in the document.

Final Step/Lead Reviewer Consolidation

If you are using “Lead Reviewer” style Workflow templates, any reviewer assigned to the final step of the workflow will be able to consolidate the final markups and also:

  • add their own markups
  • comment and clarify other markups
  • change or delete markups added by other reviewers.

Note: All of the original markups entered during the workflow are retained in the document register as historical versions of the document.

Tip!

A lead reviewer is able to edit and delete markups ONLY IF the workflow outcome is decided by the “Final step outcome (Lead reviewer)” and not by the “Lowest of all step outcomes.

Consolidating documents after a parallel review

When multiple reviewers use either online markups or replacement files within parallel steps, the document being reviewed will be automatically replaced by a zip file containing all of the different reviewers’ marked-up files.

Typically the next step in the workflow will then consolidate those markups to combine them into a single file.

The easiest way to do this is to click the Consolidate Markups link, this will merge all markups from the different reviewers into one file.

Alternatively you can do it by downloading the zip file and manually consolidating the comments into a single file. You will then need to upload the consolidated file back into the workflow.

Pre-Existing Autovue Markups

All markups created using the old viewer (Autovue) were automatically converted as PDF renditions of the original documents. They are accessible both as single or zip downloads.

Note:

  • Aconex will retain all of the original Autovue markup files so should there be any issues with individual documents which cannot be converted to PDF renditions for any reason, they will still be accessible on request.
  • Autovue markups which were added to zip files can’t be automatically converted. ie, if the markup was created by opening a zip file in Autovue, then opening one of the contained files and adding a markup to it, these will not be extracted as PDF renditions. This matches the behavior of the current Zip download with Markups feature.