Tutorials TakeoffCraft help Walkthroughs
Start a takeoff and open a plan set
Open one or several PDFs as a plan set, find your way round the sheets, and move between them.
Written for TakeoffCraft 0.3. The same help is inside the app: press F1.
A plan set is often several PDFs: architectural, structural, mechanical. TakeoffCraft opens them side by side as one list of sheets, and one takeoff can cover all of them.
Open the PDFs
- Choose Open PDFs in the File group, or press ⌘OCtrl+O.
- In the file dialog, select every PDF of the set. Hold Command / Ctrl / Ctrl to pick several, or ⇧Shift to pick a range.
- Choose Open. A "Opening (name)…" message shows while each file is read. Then every page appears under Sheets and the first page of the first new PDF opens.
You can also drag the PDFs from Finder / File Explorer / your file manager and drop them anywhere on TakeoffCraft. A "Drop PDFs or a .takeoff.json" frame appears while you drag.
To add more PDFs later, do the same again. PDFs that are already open are skipped.
Find a sheet
- Scroll the Sheets list on the left and click a sheet.
- Type in Search sheets at the top of the list to filter by sheet number, file name or page label. The count beside Sheets shows "3 of 40" while a filter is on.
- Press fn ↓Page Down for the next sheet and fn ↑Page Up for the previous one. They follow the list as filtered.
Mac
On a Mac keyboard without Page Up and Page Down keys, press fn with the up or down arrow.
How sheets are named
- A page whose PDF gives it a label, such as
A-101, is named by that label. - A page with no label (or a label that is just its page number) is named "(file name), page (n)".
- With several PDFs open, labeled sheets also carry the file name: "A-101 — Architectural".
Sheet names cannot be typed in by hand yet.
Look around a sheet
- Turn the mouse wheel to zoom at the pointer.
- Drag with the left or middle button to pan. With Auto count, or when you start on a mark's corner, hold SpaceSpace while you drag, or drag with the middle button.
- Press FF or choose Fit page to see the whole sheet; WW or Fit width fits its width.
- Press ++ or == to zoom in and −− to zoom out, around the middle of the view.
Each sheet remembers its own zoom and position while it stays open.
Next
Before you can measure a sheet, it needs a scale: Set the scale.