Scan drawings

Setting up a project means building its location tree — every building, level, and room that defects will later hang off. On a mid-size residential job that's several hundred rows, and typing them out is the single dullest hour in the whole setup.

Scan drawings does the first pass for you. Upload a PDF floor plan, and the room and level names are read off it into a suggested tree. You review that tree, fix what's wrong, and commit it.

The review step is the point. Nothing reaches your project until a person has looked at it and pressed the button.

Running a scan

The wizard has four steps: Upload, Analyse, Review, Done.

1. 01Upload — drag in one or more PDF drawings. Floor plans with labelled rooms work best; a drawing with no text on it has nothing to read.
2. 02Analyse — each file is processed in turn, with its progress shown. Large drawing sets take a little while; you can leave the wizard open while it works.
3. 03Review — the suggested tree appears, ready to edit.
4. 04Done — the locations are created, and you're told how many.

You can start a scan from the Locations screen, or from the project setup checklist when you first create a project.

Reviewing the suggested tree

This is where you spend your time, and it's designed for skimming rather than reading:

• →Rename anything read incorrectly — "Bedrrom 2" is exactly the kind of thing to expect from a hand-annotated plan.
• →Change the type of a row — what came through as a room may belong as a level, or vice versa.
• →Delete rows that aren't real locations. Title blocks, legends, and north arrows sometimes make it through.
• →Re-nest rows by moving them under a different parent, up to five levels deep.

Each suggestion shows how confident the read was and which drawing it came from, so you know which parts of the tree to check hardest.

If something goes wrong partway through committing, you're told which rows failed and why, and you can fix those and retry — you don't lose the whole tree over one bad row.

Adding more drawings, and re-scanning

A project is rarely one drawing.

• →Add another drawing to an existing scan and its results merge into the tree you've already reviewed, rather than replacing it.
• →Re-scan a drawing when a new revision comes through. You can replace just the part of the tree that came from that drawing, and the new scan keeps a link back to the one it supersedes.
• →Restore the original if you've edited the tree into a worse state and want the raw suggestion back.

What it doesn't do

Worth being straight about the edges:

• →It reads what's written on the drawing. It doesn't infer rooms that aren't labelled, and it can't tell you a plan is out of date.
• →It suggests a structure; it doesn't enforce your naming convention. If you have one, apply it during review.
• →It won't touch locations that already exist on the project — a scan adds, it doesn't reorganise what's there.

If a drawing isn't going to give you a useful read, add manually instead is right there in the wizard. The scan is a shortcut, not a requirement.

What to read next

• →Locations — the tree itself, and everything that hangs off it.
• →Documents & drawings — the register those PDFs live in.
• →Projects — the rest of project setup.