Understand · New to this · 5 min
How DatoMark works, and what it won’t do
Where your drawings live, where numbers come from, and the promises the program keeps so you can trust a quantity.
DatoMark is a PDF viewer, marker and take-off tool that runs in your browser. A few ideas explain nearly everything about how it behaves.
Your drawings are not uploaded
In this trial, drawings and measurements are processed on your own device; there’s no hosted drawing-storage service. So that your work is there when you come back, a working copy of each drawing you open, with your marks, is kept in this browser on this device; it is not on our servers, and it is what Recent work and your dashboard list. Processed locally describes that drawing workflow. Where your files and work are kept says it in full. Loading the website, signing in and loading software dependencies still involve network requests. Feedback is sent only if a sending service is configured and you choose to send it; otherwise you can copy or save the report. A Dato Room is a separate flow: while you’re in one, your marks, chat and (if you share it) the drawing are sealed on your computer and carried by a relay that can’t read them, and the status bar says so. Open Legal & trust from Home or Settings for the current draft privacy and storage details.
The drawing is the source
Quantities come from the geometry you measured and the scale you set, never from reading numbers off the drawing with text recognition. If a dimension on the sheet says 3,000 and you measure 2,950, the program reports what you measured. That’s deliberate: a take-off has to be reproducible from the lines on the page.
It says when it is guessing
Some jobs can be helped by the machine: finding every copy of a symbol, reading a title block from a picture, recognising a specification. Whenever that happens the result is shown to you first, marked with how it was found (drawing text, vector match, visual match), and nothing is counted until you have looked. A visual match from a scan is always labelled as inferred.
How a count is found, and how much to trust it
Nothing is hidden
- A working shows every step from the measured length to the final figure: waste, multipliers, deductions, rounding.
- A measurement made before the scale was set is flagged, not silently converted.
- A number that can’t be worked out says why, instead of showing a plausible-looking zero.
What it won’t do
- It isn’t a price book. It produces quantities and orders. If you type a rate for a group it multiplies, and that’s all it knows about price.
- It won’t read quantities from text on the drawing, or invent a scale.
- It doesn’t read a model (IFC or Revit). It reads PDFs and the lines in them.
- It doesn’t edit the original PDF. Your markup is kept alongside it, and an export is a new file.