The measurement extractor.
You give it a floor-plan PDF. It finds the rooms, walls and openings (doors and windows) and measures them. It reads scanned and photographed pages as well as PDFs made from drawing software, and it can straighten a crooked page first.
The scale comes first
Every measurement depends on the drawing's scale, so the software works that out before anything else. It reads the printed scale note and the dimension labels, and checks the result against door widths. You can set the scale yourself, and a scale you set is never replaced. Every result shows how sure the software is of the scale, because a wrong scale spoils every number at once. Small print on a plan can be misread, so the confidence in a scale is sometimes lower until you confirm it yourself. The guide to measuring a PDF floor plan shows how to do the same check by hand.
What it measures
- For each room: floor area, perimeter, ceiling area, volume, and the wall area with the doors and windows taken out.
- Wall lengths, with curved walls measured along the curve.
- The doors and windows it found, with their widths. Unless you set a height, it uses 6'8" for doors and 3'8" for windows.
- The building's outline, and more than one floor, with a floor that repeats counted once for each repeat.
Area is reported two ways: net, to the inside faces of the walls, which is the headline figure, and gross, to the centre of the walls. The guide to what a floor-plan takeoff includes explains the difference.
Material quantities
From those measurements it gives raw quantities: wall surface, drywall area and paint area (with the ceiling shown separately) and baseboard length. It does not add waste factors, choose sheet sizes, apply coverage or coats, or put prices on anything. Painters, drywall finishers and flooring installers apply their own waste and pricing, so those decisions stay with you. For rough numbers, our free drywall, paint and baseboard calculators take it from there.