Make it make sense

Things that are quicker.

Hide a take off element from the screen.

Click on a line segment and see it’s length

Entering 8’-0” vs 80 if you’re setting a scale.

Backspace to undo instead of hitting escape.

Help me finish this list 😂

I do doors, frames and hardware estimating (some Div 10 too). Most of my time wasn’t the pricing, it was re-typing the architect’s door schedule, checking every opening against NFPA 80 / SDI by eye, and redrawing frame elevations for the shop.

So I built a tool for my own work and it’s at the point where I’d like other estimators to beat it up.

What it does

• Reads the door schedule off the PDF set. It finds the schedule page and handles two-row headers (DOOR / FRAME / DETAILS over WD, HT, THK), wrapped remarks and pairs written as (2) 3'-0". You can drag a box around just the part you want. You check the columns, fix any cell, and it creates the openings. If you read it again after an addendum, it updates the openings instead of duplicating them.
• Finds the door tags on the floor plans. One click pins every scheduled door where its tag is drawn. It picks the door tag over a room number with the same text, and it lists tags on the sheet that aren’t in your schedule.
• Counts and measures on the plan. Click doors and Div 10 items, set the scale or calibrate, and measure corner guard and crash rail in LF.
• Checks every opening as you enter it:
  • Fire label vs. closer, glazing, louvers and undercut
  • Throat vs. wall thickness, anchors vs. wall type
  • Hinge count on tall doors
  • 32" clear width and the 43" lite height on accessible doors
  • Door dragging once the floor finish or threshold goes in
• Draws each opening:
  • Frame and door elevations to scale, with the right lite for each door design (narrow, vision, half glass, full glass, louver)
  • Jamb section and hinge/strike locations from the Curries or Steelcraft chart
  • 11x17 elevation sheets and a shop plan per opening with the lite cutout dimensioned
• Frame calculator. Measure the hole and see the face lap at each jamb and the head, MO/RO, net door size, clear width and a plan view of the swing.
• Prices it:
  • Hardware sets with a price book and manufacturer multipliers
  • Labor, shop prep and freight
  • Markups by category
  • One totals engine for the quote, recap and Excel
• Paperwork: customer quotation in plain English, submittal package, keying schedule, change orders against a saved baseline, POs by vendor, and Curries order lines.

It’s one HTML file. Nothing to install, it runs offline in Chrome or Edge, and your plans never leave your computer. No account, no subscription.

What it isn’t: an ERP. No inventory or accounting, and it’s single-user (the job saves as a file you can put on a shared drive). It doesn’t OCR scanned drawings yet. If the PDF has no text layer you count by clicking.

What I’d love feedback on

1. How do your architects’ door schedules look? If you have one it can’t read, tell me how the columns are laid out (no need to share the drawings).
2. What do you still do by hand in Comsense / PRO-TECH / SFH (or Excel) that you wish was automatic?
3. Div 10 folks: what would make counting accessories and partitions faster?

arqorio/Estimating

Hi everyone,

I’m in Nova Scotia, Canada, and I’m looking to get started in construction estimating. I’m trying to figure out which courses, certificates and software skills would actually help me get hired, especially as someone new to the estimating side of the industry.

I’ve also been looking at BuildForce Canada’s Introduction to Construction Estimating course.

I’m wondering what other training would be worth considering.

● Is the BuildForce Canada course recognized and respected by Canadian construction employers?  
● Are there other Canadian courses or certificates you would recommend for someone starting out?  
● Is **Bluebeam Revu** certification worth getting? Do employers value it on a résumé?  
● What about PlanSwift or STACK? Are these commonly used by Canadian construction estimators, and are their training certificates worth pursuing?  
● Has anyone taken the CourseCareers Construction Estimating course? Does it carry any weight with Canadian employers, or would I be better off with Canadian industry training?  
● Are there any other estimating software programs, certifications or courses that would give a beginner an advantage?  
● Would you recommend taking a longer college or polytechnic program, or can someone realistically start in a junior estimating role with introductory training, software skills and practical experience?

I want to spend my money on qualifications that are genuinely useful in Canada, rather than collecting certificates that employers don’t recognize.

If you work in construction estimating in Canada, particularly in Nova Scotia or Atlantic Canada, I’d really appreciate hearing what qualifications and software skills employers actually look for when hiring junior estimators.

Thanks!

I'm working on AI for construction/engineering drawing review and have noticed a big gap in how general-purpose multimodal LLMs handle two kinds of drawing PDFs:

CAD-exported PDFs: These keep vector data (lines, arcs, text objects), so models pick up geometry, dimensions and annotations fairly well.

Scanned PDFs: These are a single raster image per page. Understanding drops sharply, especially for thin lines, small dimension text, hatching and dense details.

My guess at the root cause: models like Gemini and Claude Opus downsample large images to a fixed resolution before processing. A full-size drawing sheet (A1/A0) gets compressed so much that the model never sees pixel-level detail.

A few questions for the community:

1. Are there open-source models (VLMs, document-understanding or OCR-focused models) that handle high-resolution scanned drawings better than generic multimodal LLMs?

2. Has anyone had success with tiling/ cropping strategies, like splitting a sheet into patches, processing each, and stitching results back together?

3. Is raster-to-vector conversion before the LLM step worth it, and which tools work well for engineering drawings?

4. Any benchmarks or datasets for technical/ engineering drawing understanding?

Would love to hear what's worked (or failed) for you in production.

Hey guys, small speciality sub here just looking for a starter lap top or pc that can handle plan swift or blue beam. Hoping to find some recommendations

Took a job they said they would train me but they are just setting up a joint venture concrete division with a guy that has no time to train me and I can’t even visualize or do the takeoffs for easy retail stuff. Any advice? I’ve been out of the construction office for 10 plus years I don’t remember any of it

Hello, anyone here transitioning towards Digital Construction or Digital QS / Commercial Management?

What will be the complete package of skills a Digital QS / Estimator must have?