Tour of the editor

The editor has four areas. Once you can name them, the rest of this documentation is much easier to follow.

Area	Where	What it is for
Toolbar	Left edge	Choosing a tool
Canvas	Centre	The drawing, and where you take off
Canvas view controls	Over the canvas	How the drawing is displayed, and fill options
Right panel	Right side	Your takeoff: work in progress at the top, saved layers below

The toolbar

Tools are grouped by what they do, with dividers between groups. Every tool has a single-key shortcut, shown in brackets below and in the tooltip when you hover.

Area tools

	Tool	Key
🎯	Region	R
🎯⬆️	Expand Region	X
🎨	Precision Region	P
⭕	Shape	S
🔵	Color Sweep	D
🔄	Inclusive Region	I
✏️	Free Trace	F

See Area takeoff for choosing between these.

Boundary, erasing and lengths

	Tool	Key
🖊️	Manual Border	B
🧽	Eraser	E
📏	Linear Region	L

Counting

	Tool	Key
🔢	Count	C
🔍	Auto Count	A

Working aids and everything else

	Tool	Key
🔍	Magnifier	H
📐	Measure Width	W
✏️	Markup	M
👆	Inspect	V
🗺️	Zone	Z

Some tools open a second row of options when selected, for example the Eraser offers several shapes and the Linear Region offers several drawing modes. Those sub-options are covered on each tool’s own page.

The canvas

The drawing itself, and where all takeoff happens.

• Pan: drag with the middle mouse button. This works whichever tool is selected, so you can move around without switching away from what you are doing. Dragging with the left button also pans when you are not mid drawing.
• Zoom: scroll wheel.
• Fit to Screen: returns the whole sheet to view when you have lost your bearings.

Middle button drag is the one worth building the habit around, since it never conflicts with the tool in your hand.

Zoom in before clicking on anything tight. Accuracy of your clicks carries straight into the quantities.

Canvas view controls

These sit over the canvas and change how the drawing is displayed or how fills behave. They do not change any quantity you have already measured.

Display

Crisp sharpens the drawing so fine lines and small text are easier to read. Useful on dense sheets and on drawings that arrived slightly soft.

Hueprint re-presents the drawing so that different elements are easier to tell apart and select. It is particularly effective on drawings where materials are hard to distinguish by eye.

TakeOff View shows your takeoff over the drawing. This is the normal working view.

3D View shows the takeoff as a three dimensional plan, using the depths you have set. It is a good way to sanity check volumes and to show a client what has been measured.

Fit to Screen returns the whole sheet to view.

Note

If a control is greyed out with “Not available for this drawing”, that feature does not apply to this sheet.

Fill options

These change how the next fill behaves. Set them before you click, not after.

Boundary restricts a fill so it respects the boundary you are working within.

Bounding Box Fill fills the rectangle enclosing what you selected rather than only the detected shape. Use it for an area that should be measured as a rectangle even though the drawing shows it irregularly.

Perimeter Fill closes the area up to its perimeter, which is useful where an area is defined by an outline rather than by a solid fill.

Door-aware Fill keeps a fill from escaping through door openings. Use it for room by room takeoff on floor plans, where a fill would otherwise run through every doorway and swallow the whole floor.

Only fill same-color points restricts a multi point fill to points matching the colour you started from, so one action does not pick up two materials.

The right panel

Your takeoff lives here in two sections.

Work in progress

New takeoff appears here first. Think of it as your working area: it is yours to adjust freely before you commit it.

Each group shows its name, its colour, how many items it contains and its running total. Expand a group to see the individual items in it.

Work in progress groups have their own Undo and Redo, which step through the operations on that group specifically rather than the whole drawing. That means you can back out a bad erase on one material without disturbing anything else.

When a group is right, save it. It moves down into saved layers.

Saved layers

Committed takeoff. This is what exports and what you price from.

• Edit Group reopens a group to change its name, colour or settings.
• Drag to reorder changes the order groups are drawn and listed in, which matters when regions overlap visually and on the exported sheet.
• Hide a group to take it out of the view and out of the totals, which is a quick way to check one material on its own.

Region Settings

Reached from the settings control, these affect how the region tools behave.

Setting	What it does	Default
Color Tolerance	How closely colours must match to count as the same area. Range 1 to 50.	8
Max Pixels	An upper size limit on a single region, which stops a runaway fill from consuming a whole sheet.	Maximum
Region Opacity	How solid your takeoff looks over the drawing. Lower it to read the drawing underneath.	0.9
Unit System	Metres or feet for new work.	Metres

Reset Defaults returns all of them to the values above.

Region Opacity is display only and never changes a quantity. Color Tolerance and Max Pixels affect fills you make from that point onward, not fills you have already made.

Note

Changing a default here applies to new work. Existing groups keep the settings they were taken off with, so adjusting tolerance will not retrospectively alter areas you have already measured.

Status and progress

Long operations show progress, and some can be cancelled while they run. If a drawing is large, the first open takes longest and later opens are quicker.

Where to go next

• Area takeoff
• Linear takeoff
• Setting the drawing scale