By
Doug_N
My projects are increasingly moving into the digital submission world. In digital format, various municipalities are setting up criteria for acceptable submission standards that are divergent. That is to say, each municipality is reinventing the wheel. So far as I can tell, no two municipalities have adopted the same submission standards, and so submission has become a major task up from a simple formality.
The Province of Ontaria adopted a standard method for submission of paper documents.
1) Fill out the mandated building permit form (mandated by the Ontario Building Code Act) that all municipalities had to accept.
2) Provide at least 2 copies of the drawings in whatever scale is shown on the drawing.
3) Pay the fee by cash or cheque
Simple and pretty much the same everywhere.
Electronic Submission Nightmare
Easiest.
1) Same as 1 above in PDF
2) Same as 2 above except one PDF file (PDF must not exceed 5meg. Limit for most email servers)
3) Same as 3 above but email Interac transfer
4) Reply to comments from the plan examiner sent by email. Send revised pages to the examiner in PDF
Hardest:
1) Create an on-line account with the municipality
2) Fill out an on- line application form
3) Register all parties (Owner and Agent at a minimum) and these people also have to participate in the on-line experience.
4) Create individual PDF files for each drawing page to be submitted
a) Each page to have proscribed blank area (2" x 5") for municipal stamps and comments,
b) Each page to have a name that corresponds to the title block name
c) Each PDF to be in vector format. Raster format is not acceptable. (CA does not support vector PDF) I suspect the vector PDF would be much smaller than a raster PDF)
e) Each page has to be a flattened file, no layers
d) Each page must not have any security features that would prevent editing or commenting (try to convince an Engineer who has stamped the drawing to do this!)
f) PDF file size must not exceed (put in some arbitrary limit here.)
5) Pay the fees as required, usually on line,
6) Try to understand the matrix of comments that contain examiner's comments.
7) Upload revised drawing.
8) Comment on the examiner's matrix table.
As a result of all of this I have been experimenting with PDF print drivers, and Winzip PDF Compressor.
My hat is off to the programmers at CA! The PDF print driver included with CA out performs all of the other print drivers that I have installed on my computer for file size.
Now if only I could automatically print, as a batch, all drawing files with an automatic link to the layout page title and page number or label. That would be amazing.
I wonder if some of that might be achieved in Ruby? If CA made a printing template that allowed for individual pages as a batch print?
By JKEdmo
By creatrix
By Doug_N
Recommended Posts
Please sign in to comment
You will be able to leave a comment after signing in
Sign In Now