PSA: I finally figured out why my detail views kept getting flagged for review

About three months ago, I was working on a set of shop drawings for a small factory job in Toledo. Every time I sent a detail view to the lead engineer, it would come back with a review note asking for a scale check. I was sure my scale was right, so I was pretty confused. After the third time, I sat down with the engineer on a video call and he pointed out my view titles. I had been putting the scale in the title like 'Detail A - 1/2"=1'-0"' but the software was reading the dash as a minus sign in some export formats. He told me to just use a colon instead, so now I write 'Detail A: 1/2"=1'-0"'. It sounds small, but it fixed the whole issue. Has anyone else run into weird formatting problems like that with automated checks?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_harper14d ago

Exactly, it's crazy how one little mark can mess up the whole system. I bet @knight.felix will save a ton of time fixing those flags. The real lesson is that these automated checks are just looking for very specific text strings. They don't understand the drawing, they just match patterns. So if the rule is set to look for a colon, a dash might as well be gibberish. It makes you wonder what other tiny formatting things are causing hold-ups that no one has caught yet. We should all probably check our office standards against what the review software actually expects.

knight.felix15d ago

Man, I always used the dash too. Never thought a simple colon could stop so many automated flags. Gonna switch my templates over today.

diana61715d ago

Yeah I saw a whole thread about this last week. People were saying colons just look more official to the bots or something. Makes sense I guess.