Ballooning a drawing should take minutes, not an afternoon
Ballooning — numbering every dimension on a drawing and listing each one in an inspection sheet — is the slowest step of inspection planning. Done by hand on an 80-dimension print, it takes the better part of an hour and one skipped dimension invalidates the whole sheet.
Asterion Report balloons the drawing for you: import the PDF, select a zone, and the dimensions come out numbered, tolerated and ready to measure.
How automatic ballooning works
You work zone by zone, not blind on the whole sheet: select a view, the AI reads it and returns the dimensions it found — nominal, tolerance, GD&T frame. Each one gets a balloon on the drawing and a numbered row in the report. Click a row and the matching balloon lights up on the print, so checking the extraction takes seconds.
Only the selected zone is sent for analysis, never the full drawing — a deliberate data-security choice.
- 95% of dimensions detected across 1000+ real production drawings
- 88% perfect without any touch-up
- GD&T symbols and general tolerances (ISO 2768, ASME, DIN) handled
- An 80-dimension report: from 45 minutes down to about 7
The balloon is only the beginning
Most ballooning tools stop at the numbered drawing and an export. Here the ballooned drawing IS the live report: operators enter measurements against each balloon — on screen or in pencil on the printed sheet, transcribed by handwriting OCR — and sign per dimension. When the part comes back next month, duplicate the report for free.
Manual, CAD-based or AI ballooning: what actually changes
A quick definition: ballooning (also called bubbling) is numbering every characteristic on a technical drawing so each one can be listed, measured and traced in an inspection sheet. Three ways exist to do it. By hand in a PDF editor: free, but an hour per complex drawing and no link between the balloon and the report. From native CAD files: precise, but job shops receive PDFs from customers, rarely usable CAD. From the PDF itself with AI extraction: the drawing you actually receive becomes the report you actually deliver.
The differences that matter day to day: what happens on revision change (re-extract one view versus renumber everything), whether handwritten measurements are accepted (shops measure in pencil at the bench), and whether the balloon stays connected to the measured value or is just a picture. A ballooned drawing that is not the live report only moves the retyping problem one step later.
Priced for job shops
Unlimited users on every plan. Free trial, 60 days, with your own drawings, no credit card. Data hosted in Montreal, Canada.