Manual
The workflow and the keyboard shortcuts. Walls are drawn by clicking a chain, typing the length in millimetres and pressing Enter.
Drawing walls
W activates the wall tool; pressing W again steps through the four shapes it draws: line, rectangle, circle and polygon. The same choice is in the panel, next to the thickness the next wall is drawn at.
With the line, the first click places a start point and subsequent clicks form a chain. A length in millimetres can be typed while drawing. Enter commits the segment at that length in the selected direction; with nothing typed, Enter closes the chain back onto its first point. Esc ends the chain.
The other three shapes take two points: corner and opposite corner for the rectangle, centre and radius for the circle and the polygon. Clicking and dragging both work. Shift keeps the rectangle square, and on a touch screen the Square toggle does the same. What they leave behind are ordinary walls — the circle is four quarter arcs — free to be moved, curved and given openings.
- O toggles angle snapping (90°/45°). Shift holds the angle for as long as it is down, angle snapping on or off.
- A wall drawn under the angle lock ends on the wall it is aimed at: where the locked direction crosses a wall near the cursor, the end lands on that crossing and splits that wall.
- G toggles grid snapping. Off still rounds to whole millimetres.
- A new wall splits every wall it crosses, and splits itself at every node it runs through.
- A stretch a collinear wall already carries is not drawn again: two rectangles side by side share one wall rather than stacking two. That wall keeps the thickness it had.
Beside the thickness, the panel states what the wall is and what it is drawn in. The material is masonry, concrete, timber, steel, glass or sandwich panel; not stated is a state of its own rather than an assumption. Glass and sandwich panel are infill and change the drawing: the body is drawn as a light band between its two faces rather than as poché. Colour is meaning here too, not formatting — black is existing, red to be built, yellow to be removed — and it fills the wall body, as a verbouwtekening does. Those choices stay armed for the next wall, the way the thickness does.
Any wall can carry posts: the frame its body is held in. That is one idea for what is one thing in plan — the mullions of a curtain wall, the columns of a steel portal frame carrying sandwich panels, the studs of a timber wall. The spacing is centre to centre and reads as a maximum bay width: each run between openings is divided into equal bays no wider than the stated figure. A door therefore pushes the posts of its own run aside instead of one landing in the doorway, and the door jambs read as the posts they are in a real pui.
The post width is stated separately. Without one a post draws as a line — the centres are known, the
section is not yet. With one it is a member at the size it is built to, its depth being the wall
thickness itself, and it is never drawn wider than its own bay. A wall carrying posts exports as an IFC
ELEMENTEDWALL: assembled from components. Where the frame carries and the cladding does not,
the wall itself is load-bearing — that is what loadBearing states about the element; the
columns are not modelled separately.
Separate from that is the cladding: a skin outside the structural body. thickness
stays the structure, so a sandwich wall built 100 + 100 is thickness 100 with a facade of 100. That skin
lies wholly outside the structural faces, so it changes nothing about the wall graph, room detection or
the net area — it is drawn as a white band with a thin outline, as a building drawing does. Two clad
walls miter their skins at a corner; an unclad wall running into one lets the skin pass. What the facade
does set is the gross area: under the gross (BVO) area mode, measurement runs to the outer face of
the facade where a bounding wall has one and to the centreline where it does not — which is what NEN 2580
says about a shared party wall. A clad wall exports to IFC as an IfcMaterialLayerSet:
structure and cladding as ordered layers.
Wall surface states the face area the storey's walls present — the quantity stucco, paint and wallpaper are ordered against. Each wall's net area appears in the wall list and in the pane of the selected wall; each room's appears under its row in the room list; the storey carries its own total, with an in rooms line beside it for what the rooms take between them. What is measured is the mitered face length times the height, on both faces: a wall running between two thicker walls has an inner face shorter than its centreline and an outer face longer, and it is the face that gets finished. Openings are deducted at their stated size from both faces, clamped to the face itself. Where a wall carries cladding an inner faces line appears beside it: the same net area without the clad side, which is by definition outside. A wall that states no cladding counts with both faces, since the document does not then say which side is outside. Like every figure here, this is reported and not checked.
Reveals — dagkanten — stand as their own line beside the net area, and together they make to finish. A reveal is the surface of the opening itself, through the wall's thickness: two jambs and a head. No sill — under a door that is the floor, and under a window it takes a window board rather than plaster. One reveal is shared by the two sides, half each, and that is not an approximation to apologise for: on a window in the facade the inner reveal is plasterwork and the outer one is facade detail, and the split puts each where it belongs. It is measured over the structural thickness; cladding makes the reveal deeper, but that is facade work. Where a suspended ceiling sits below the head, the head does not count and the jambs stop at the ceiling.
The height is taken per face, because the two sides of one wall stand in two rooms. With no suspended ceiling that is floor to floor; with one, each face is measured to the ceiling of the room it stands in. The storey's ceiling is set in the Plan pane, and a room states its own in the room list — the bathroom under a dropped ceiling while the rest runs on. The wall between them is then finished to 2300 on the bathroom side and to the floor above on the other, which is exactly what that wall's pane shows. A ceiling is a finish: it changes nothing about the storey height, what a stair climbs, the room areas or the exports. A stated height at or above the storey height finishes nothing extra and so does not count. A floor build-up is not modelled.
Selecting, moving, curving
V activates selection and dragging for nodes, walls and symbols. A selected wall displays a diamond handle at its midpoint; dragging it forms a circular arc. The sagitta in millimetres is editable in the panel, alongside thickness and length. Editing the length moves the far node along the wall direction.
Two walls that stop short of each other can be joined: select both (Shift+click) and the panel offers Join walls. Both are extended to where their directions cross and the ends become one node — the same works for an overlap, where the crossing simply lies behind one of the ends. Parallel walls have no crossing, so their ends are welded at the midpoint and the button says so. Where the join cannot be made, the panel states which condition failed: the walls already share a node, one end is attached to a third wall, or they do not reach each other.
Nodes can also be added and removed on their own. Cmd/Ctrl+click on a wall splits it there and selects the new node, so its x and y can be set exactly — the same gesture as on a service run. A selected node is drawn in the selection colour, so it is clear what Del will act on: it removes the node, not the wall. Where two walls meet there they become one — a corner included, since that is what removing a node means. At a wall end there is nothing to heal into and that one wall goes with it. Where three or more walls meet, nothing happens: removing it would leave loose ends, and Delete with walls sits beside it for anyone who wants that. Del behaves the same way on a service run — the point goes and its neighbours are reconnected. Where a node sits between exactly two walls that run in one line and state the same things, the panel offers Remove node: the two become one wall and the openings move with it. The same operation sits on the walls themselves: select both sections and the panel offers Merge walls — two sections are two things on the screen, and that is where the button gets looked for. Where it cannot be done, the panel says why.
Doors, windows and passages
D, N and P place a door, window and passage respectively on a wall. During placement, dimensions to both wall ends are displayed. Direction, width and type are then configured in the panel; all options appear on door and window types.
With an opening tool active, the panel states what the next placement gets: width, hand and
fire resistance. Those choices persist, so a run of identical doors comes out right in one pass instead
of one edit at a time afterwards. The widths offered are the standard Dutch internal frame openings —
730, 780, 830, 880, 930 and 1010 mm — plus the double-leaf sizes; any other width stays typeable.
width is the clear frame opening, not the door leaf.
Fire resistance is written the way a drawing writes it: WBDBO with the rating in minutes, alongside WBD and WRD. Setting a rating marks the door self-closing. The annotation reaches the plan and every export.
An opening remains associated with its wall and moves when that wall moves.
Symbols
S opens the symbol tool. Palette search matches both languages; for example, “wandcontactdoos” finds the socket in the English interface. Wall-mounted symbols snap to the wall face and align with it. R rotates, M mirrors, and Alt-drag copies one that is already right. Colour indicates status: black is existing, red is new work and yellow is to be removed. All 82 are listed under floorplan symbols.
Stairs
T opens the stair tool with the fifteen types from the plan-symbol sheet: straight flight, stair with a landing, quarter turns at the foot or the top, spiral and helical stairs, an escalator, a loft ladder, climbing irons and a ramp. A stair is not a symbol: its width, going and tread count are stored in the document, so the same flight is 900 mm wide in a house and 1200 in a unit. The rise comes from the storey: a stair follows the storey height set in the Plan panel unless it states one of its own, which a flight up to a mezzanine beside a void needs. A flight of 15 treads has 16 risers, so a 2800 mm storey gives a 175 riser and a walking rule of 570. The treads, the walking line, the arrow and where the break line falls all follow from that. The panel puts the results beside the inputs and states in red where a figure falls outside the ordinary; Wallgraph does not check regulations. R turns a quarter about the middle of the stair and M mirrors, before placing as well as after. A stair that turns states its direction in the panel, clockwise or anticlockwise; a stair with a quarter at each end sets each quarter on its own, so it either comes back beside itself at the top or leaves to the other side. The arrow always points from the bottom of the flight to the top; a stair going down is the same stair, turned around. A flight on the storey below shows through faintly on the plan above it, which is where it arrives.
Structure
H opens the structure tool: column, beam, railing and vide — the load-bearing and guarding parts that are not walls. None of them enters the wall graph: a column stands free of the centerlines even where it sits in a wall, a beam spans whatever carries it, and a railing guards an edge without bounding a room. Each is a placed object carrying its own dimensions, like a stair, and the drawing follows from them.
The plan's section plane decides how each is drawn. A column is cut by it and takes poché, as a wall does; the section is rectangular, round or an H-profile, with width and depth in the document. A column carries the floor above unless it states a height of its own, which a column under the floor edge of a void needs. A beam runs above the section plane and is therefore dashed, as a wall cabinet is; the ordinary rolled sections (HEA, HEB, IPE) are listed in the panel and set flange width, section height and the designation at once, but the document stores the figures and the label, not the table row. A beam's top sits at the storey height unless an underside of its own is stated. A railing stands below the section plane and is drawn in outline: two lines at the handrail's width, with a tick per baluster at the stated centres. Beams and railings are set out between two points, by clicking or dragging; O locks the angle. A wall with its own height of 1200 mm or less — a parapet, a knee wall, a plinth — is outlined rather than hatched for the same reason.
A vide is an opening in the floor, open to the storey below. It belongs to the floor the hole is cut in rather than being a storey of its own — the slab has a hole and the plan of that storey draws it. A stairwell opening is the same object: the hole a flight from below comes up through, drawn on the plan of the floor above. The mark is the outline with a diagonal from each corner, and it cuts the floor tint underneath, because a vide is not floor.
Material is a choice per element, as it is for a wall, and not stated is an answer of its own. The IFC export writes column, beam and railing as elements of their own with their figures; the 3D view extrudes them to their height. Wallgraph checks nothing about a structure: a column or beam is a figure on the drawing, not a calculation.
Fit-out
C opens the fit-out tool: cabinetry, kitchen appliances, sanitary fixtures and furniture. None of them is a symbol, for the reason a stair is not: the same unit is built 400, 600 or 800 mm wide, a bath is 1700 or 1800 long, and a table is whatever the room takes. Width, depth and height live in the document, and the carcass, the front, the hinge mark, the bowl and the worktop overhang are derived from them at render time.
The panel groups the named pieces by room — kitchen, sanitary, cabinets and racking, furniture. Under the picker are the fields that form actually reads: a cabinet has a height class, a front and a hinge side; an appliance has its mark; a shower has a tray or none; a bed has only a size. A cabinet's height class decides how it meets the plan's section plane: base units are seen from above and tall units are cut through, both drawn solid; wall units and extractor hoods hang entirely above it and are therefore drawn dashed, as overhead work is.
For cabinetry the sizes offered are the standard module widths: 150, 200, 300, 400, 450, 500, 600, 800, 900, 1000 and 1200 mm, beside a typed width for a filler cut to size; other forms carry their own ladder. A piece that stands against a wall snaps flush to it and to the piece beside it, so a kitchen comes out as a continuous run rather than a line of units aligned by eye. A free-standing piece — a bed, a sofa, a table — lands where the cursor is. R turns a quarter about the middle, M mirrors.
Shift-click picks out more than one piece; dragging then moves everything selected, and turning, mirroring and deleting apply to the whole selection. A group takes no snap, so a run that has been arranged stays arranged. Alt-drag copies instead of moving — the copy follows the cursor with the original's size, colour and hinge side.
Building services
U opens the services tool. A run is one connected network of points and segments rather than a loose line: a shared trunk is stored once and branches from there to as many sockets, taps, drains or air terminals as it needs. Click to place points; Esc or a double-click ends the run, and Cmd/Ctrl+click adds a point along one. There are five disciplines — electrical, water, heating, ventilation and gas — each with its own colour and its own layer under Visible layers. Heating is its own discipline rather than a kind of water: CV pipe is sized on a different basis and appears on an installation drawing as a separate system, even where one installer lays both.
What a run states depends on its discipline, and decides how it draws:
- Electrical — power, utp or coax; the number of cores; board, group and a cable tag. A data run is dashed, a power run solid.
- Water — cold, hot or drain, with the diameter: 15/22/28 for supply, 40/50/75/110 for drainage. Hot takes its own tint within the water ink; drain is dashed and heavier.
- Heating — CV flow or CV return, 15/16/22/28 mm.
- Ventilation — supply or extract, duct diameter 100 to 200 mm, and a flow rate in m³/h where one is known. Extract is dashed.
- Gas — diameter.
Every run also carries a mounting method — concealed, surface, in the floor, in or above the ceiling, or a free route — and a height above the floor. The line says what kind of run it is; how thick it draws says how much room it needs. From 50 mm up a run gains a footprint band at its true bore beneath its own line: a Ø200 duct occupies 200 mm, and a drawing that shows that as a hairline cannot answer whether it fits. Below that the line is the whole statement — a 15 mm supply leg goes where it is put. Electrical states no size at all, because a bundle of cable has no meaningful width in plan.
Symbols carry service ports. Place a symbol on a loose end of a run and that end is taken over: the point follows the symbol from then on. The following is derived rather than stored — move the socket and the end goes with it, because the run reads the symbol's current position when it draws rather than an updated copy. Where a device stands part-way along a run, the panel offers Connect to and the run is split there; where it stands exactly on a bend or a junction, it offers Connect here to and that existing point is adopted, so the run turns at the device. Both are a choice in the panel and never happen on their own: a placement should not silently swallow a junction in the middle of a trunk. Until a device is connected, the panel names which service is still open.
A loose endpoint can be typed as a source, capped, or a run leaving the model, and can be continued to the storey above or below. Such a riser is visible on every storey it touches, with its own shaft tag. The panel counts what arrives, leaves and passes through per storey, and how much vertical run belongs to that storey — each shaft once, charged to the lowest storey it touches, so the same shaft is not counted again on every plan. What does not add up is reported rather than refused: a riser pointing at a point that no longer exists, one joining points on the same storey, one joining different disciplines, or one joining runs whose data disagree.
The panel states the drawn length, and separately the drops to the devices the run is connected to: those are real cable but are not on the plan, so they are stated beside the drawn length rather than folded into it. Devices with no stated mounting height are counted, not guessed. Where the network runs across storeys, its total length is given too, with the vertical part stated separately. Two runs can be merged where that produces one connected service — the same discipline throughout, and touching; where it does not, the panel says which of the two is missing. Follow the walls takes each leg by the shortest path along the walls at a settable offset from the centreline, and leaves an ordinary run behind to edit afterwards.
On export each discipline gets its own DXF layer, with separate layers for data, water drainage and ventilation extract, since DXF settles colour and dash per layer rather than per line. The permit sheets carry no services.
Framing and naming rooms
F fits the whole plan, Shift+F the selection. Both work in any tool. Z opens the room tool: drag a box on the drawing to zoom into it, or click a room to frame it.
The panel lists every detected room in the order they appear on the drawing. A row states the area and, once it has one, the name; the button beside it turns the row into an input. The list follows the walls: a room divided in two shows as two rows, with nothing to keep in step.
3D view
3 switches to the 3D view: the whole building, extruded directly from the drawn walls — door and window openings cut out, floor slabs with their voids and stairwells, columns, beams and railings, stairs tread by tread, the fit-out piece by piece (cabinets on their plinths and under their worktops, fixtures with their tubs and bowls, furniture on its legs), every storey at its own level. Dragging orbits, scrolling zooms, Shift+drag pans; F fits everything and Esc or 3 again returns to the plan. Like the rooms, the view is derived: nothing three-dimensional is stored in the document.
Room names
A name is written in that list, or by clicking a room's area figure on the drawing, which opens the same row. An empty field takes the name off again.
Rooms themselves are derived from the walls and are not in the document; what was authored is the name and the point it was written at, so that is what is stored. Which room carries the name follows from that point. Move a wall so the point falls in the next room and the name goes with the point.
One room carries one name. Take out the wall between two named rooms and the name of the larger of the two keeps the room that results; the other is deleted, because the room it named is gone. The wall and the name go in one step, so Ctrl+Z brings both back. A name that falls in no room at all does keep drawing where it was written, which is what an open-plan space or a wall loop that is not closed yet needs.
The name sits above the area figure and carries into PNG, SVG and DXF.
Rooms and dimensions
Closed wall loops are detected as rooms and labelled with their area. That area is net by default (inner faces, NEN 2580); the canvas legend states which convention is in force, and the Plan panel can select centerline measurement. L toggles dimension lines on every wall; selecting a dimension label enables length input.
The dimension lines carry the same two conventions, chosen separately under Dimensions: centerline, clear span — measured between the wall faces, which is what interior work is set out from — or both, in which case each chain gets its own line and the clear one sits nearest the building. With the clear span shown, every rectangular room also states its free width and depth below the area, in PNG, SVG and DXF.
A opens the tape measure: click two points, or drag from one to the other, and the distance between them appears on the drawing with its horizontal and vertical components beneath. The tape catches corners, wall faces, reveals, columns, stairs, cabinets and runs, and once the first point is down also the perpendicular foot on a wall, so the clear distance to a wall is one movement. Shift holds the second end to one of eight directions; the walls' angle lock O does not apply here. A reading is not stored and appears in no export.
Saving and exporting
- PNG — the plan as an image, cropped to the drawing, no grid, with a scale bar.
- SVG — vector artwork at true scale: 1 mm in the document is 1 mm on paper printed at 100%.
- DXF — walls, swings, symbols, stairs, voids, columns, beams, railings, the fit-out split by trade, room names and areas on separate layers, in millimetres, for CAD. Overhead work gets a layer of its own, since it hangs above the section plane.
- JSON — the document itself; see document format.
The plan is saved automatically in local browser storage. This requires no account or application server. The plan remains available after the tab is closed.
Keyboard shortcuts
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
| V | select and move |
| W | draw walls; again: next shape |
| D N P | door, window, passage |
| S | place a symbol |
| T | place a stair |
| H | structure: column, beam, railing, vide |
| C | place fit-out |
| Z | rooms: drag a box, click a room, name a room |
| A | tape measure: distance between two points |
| F | fit everything in view |
| Shift+F | fit the selection |
| 3 | 3D view on/off |
| O | angle snap on/off |
| Shift | hold the angle while drawing |
| G | grid snap on/off |
| L | dimension lines on/off |
| R M | rotate about the middle, mirror |
| Shift+click | select more pieces |
| Alt+drag | drag a copy instead of the original |
| Del | delete the selection |
| Enter | close the wall chain (with no length typed) |
| Esc | cancel / end the chain |
| Ctrl+Z | undo |
| Ctrl+Shift+Z | redo |
| scroll | zoom to the cursor |
| right-drag | pan |
Open the editor. Ctrl+Z reverses the last document change.