PDF takeoff software for Mac

What a takeoff tool on a Mac has to do

The work does not change with the operating system. A set of PDFs arrives; you open a sheet, set the scale, and pull quantities off it — wall runs for partitions, room-by-room areas for finishes, perimeter for flashings and trims, counts for doors, sockets and columns. Every number needs a label and a group so the schedule reads by trade or level.

On the Mac the constraint is tooling, not method. The established desktop takeoff products are Windows applications, so a Mac seat has meant a Windows licence, a virtual machine, and a file that lives on that VM rather than on your Mac. A browser tool removes that second operating system: the PDF is read by your browser, and only the project — sheets, calibration, measurements, marks — is kept server-side.

Calibration: 1:100 means 1 mm of paper is 100 mm of building

Scale is the only thing between a click and a quantity. At 1:100, one millimetre on the sheet is 100 mm on site: a wall drawn 62 mm long is 6.20 m, and a room measuring 83 mm by 62 mm is 8.30 m by 6.20 m, so 51.46 m². The rest of the ladder behaves the same way — a metre of building is 20 mm of paper at 1:50 and 5 mm at 1:200 — and imperial sheets follow identical logic: 1/4 in = 1 ft is about 1:48, and 1/8 in = 1 ft is about 1:96.

Areas scale with the square of the factor, which is why a mis-calibrated sheet is wrong twice over: at 1:100, one square millimetre of paper is 0.01 m² of building. Set the scale from the sheet's own preset, or drag a line across a dimension the drawing states and type the real length. Calibration is per sheet because a set mixes scales — site plan at 1:500, plans at 1:100, sections at 1:50, details at 1:20 — and editing it recalculates every measurement already on that sheet.

Length, area, perimeter, count

Length for wall runs, kerbs, pipe routes and skirting. Area for rooms, roofs, formwork and paint, closed as a polygon. Perimeter for flashings, edging and trims, where the running length matters and the opening does not. Count for doors, windows, sockets, columns, manholes — a click each, totalled by label.

Every measurement carries a label and a group, so “Level 1 — partitions” is a subtotal rather than a spreadsheet exercise. The convention you pick matters as much as the clicking: internal face or centreline for a wall, gross or net for a floor. Choose one per group and put it in the label, so the number can be defended six weeks later.

Markup that goes out with the numbers

Clouds, arrows, text, highlight, rectangle, ellipse, line and freehand sit above the drawing on layers you can hide and lock — one layer per discipline or per reviewer. A status stamp (RFI ISSUED, FOR TENDER, AS BUILT) carries the state of the sheet, and undo and redo are ⌘Z and ⇧⌘Z.

Export flattens the marks into the PDF itself, so the other side sees the cloud and the dimension whether they open it in Preview, Acrobat or on a phone. What is hidden is not flattened, which is what makes layers worth using.

The schedule that leaves the app

Quantities export as CSV: one row per measurement with its sheet, label, group and value, ready to sit beside the estimate. The marked-up PDF goes out in the same breath, so whoever checks the numbers can see the line each one came from, and a printable takeoff sheet puts the list in the paper file.

Where the drawing lives

The PDF never leaves your Mac: it is read in the browser tab. The server keeps the project — the sheets you named, the calibration, the measurements, the marks — so you can pick the same set up on another Mac and carry on. Once the app is in your Dock it loads from the browser cache and keeps working with no network; measurements save when the connection returns.

What it does not do

There is no Windows build. There is no Studio Sessions-style live collaboration, no comparison overlay that diffs two revisions, no scripting API, no OCR and no automatic counting of symbols by AI. Revu tool sets (.bpx files) do not import; you rebuild the few stamps and templates you actually use. When a job needs one of those, this tool says so plainly rather than approximating it.