The plan your builder, agent or council sent you is a PDF, which means it is read-only. Draftie reads the walls, doors and windows out of it and hands back a plan you can change.
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Step 01
Vector or scanned, single or multi-page. If there are several floors, pick the page you want.
Step 02
Most drawing-office PDFs carry a scale and dimension strings, and Draftie reads them. Otherwise, calibrate from one known length.
Step 03
Move what needs moving, then export a DXF for CAD or a fresh 1:100 PDF.
A vector PDF (the kind that comes out of CAD) contains actual line geometry at actual coordinates. That is the best possible input to this: precision is preserved rather than inferred, and what comes back is close to exact.
A scanned PDF is a photograph in a PDF wrapper. It gets rasterised and goes through the same models as any image, which means resolution decides quality. A 300dpi scan is excellent. A 72dpi fax of a fax is not going to work, and no tool that claims otherwise is being straight with you.
Draftie detects which kind it has and takes the appropriate route without asking you to know the difference. If you want to check yourself, try selecting the text in your PDF viewer: if the room labels highlight as text, it is vector, and you are in the good case.
If somebody has sent you a full set, it is probably a multi-page PDF and only one or two of those pages are what you want here.
Somebody has a plan of a house they are about to renovate, and it exists only as a PDF. They want to move a wall and see what happens, and to do that in any other tool, they first have to redraw the entire existing house by hand.
That redrawing is the tedious hour this replaces. You get the existing house as editable geometry, and you spend your time on the change you actually care about. When you are done, the DXF goes to whoever is drawing the real documentation.
The second most common case is a council or building-surveyor drawing of a house as it was built decades ago. Those are usually scans, often at poor resolution, and often the only record that exists. They read well enough to be worth the attempt, and the scale is usually printed on them.
From a vector PDF, dimensions come back right to within rounding, because they were in the file.
From a scan, the error has two sources. Raster resolution sets how precisely a wall face can be located, at 300dpi a pixel is about 0.085mm on the page, which at 1:100 is 8.5mm on the building. And the calibration reference you chose scales everything: a 1% error in your reference is a 1% error across the whole plan.
That second one is under your control and worth spending ten seconds on. Calibrate against the longest dimension you are certain of. A 50mm error on a 12,000mm frontage is 0.4%; the same 50mm on an 820mm door is 6%.
The existing house exists only as a PDF, and every change you want to test requires it to be editable first.
Client intake. A PDF in, a DXF out, and the first billable hour spent on design rather than on retracing.
A council drawing of the house as built, turned into something you can measure against and mark up.
Both. A vector PDF gives near-exact results because the geometry is really in the file. A scan is treated as an image, so it depends on resolution: 200dpi and up is reliable, and much below 150dpi is not.
Try to select the room labels as text in your PDF viewer. If they highlight, it is vector and you are in the best case. If nothing selects, it is a scan.
You choose. Draftie shows you the pages and you pick the floor plan you want to work on. Elevations and sections are not usable here, it needs a plan view.
Yes, that is the DXF export, and it is the main reason people use this route. See floor plan to DXF for the layer structure and units.
From a vector PDF, yes, to within rounding. From a scan, they are as right as the calibration you gave it, which is why you should calibrate against the longest dimension you know rather than the shortest, since the error scales with it.
Scan each floor separately from its own page. Draftie works one storey at a time, and a plan with two floors overlaid on one drawing is not something it can separate.
Plans save to your own account. Crops of the drawing are sent to AI providers we contract with in order to read labels; the privacy policy sets out exactly what goes where.
Upload the PDF, get the geometry, and spend your time on the change you actually wanted to make.
Upload a PDF, freeDraftie produces concept plans, not construction documents, and its plan checks are advisory rather than a compliance certificate. Product specifications change, confirm current details with the manufacturer before relying on them.