Fix a Problem · Everyday · 3 min
“This sheet is a scan”, or fill and snap do nothing
A scan is a picture. What works on it, and what to do instead of what doesn’t.
A scanned drawing, or a photo, has no lines or words in it: only a picture of them. The status bar's Drawing intelligence says so (image-based drawing). Anything that reads lines or words has nothing to read.
- Works
- Setting the scale, Length, Area by clicking each corner, Count by clicking, markup, comments, grouping, the take-off and every export, Count every one by picture, and reading a title block by recognition.
- Doesn’t work
- Snapping to corners, Fill an area, finding words with Find in drawing, and matching symbols by their lines. Each of these says why instead of failing quietly.
If the file is a scan but should have been vector (plotted to PDF with the lines turned into a picture), ask whoever issued it for the original PDF: it will be smaller, sharper and everything will work.