Detecting Signs from a Plan — Help Centre

If you're working on fixed infrastructure — a building under construction or fit-out — every sign is usually already marked on the architectural or wayfinding plans. AI plan import reads those markings for you: upload the plan as a map, run a detection, review the proposals, and Signplanr creates a plotted placeholder sign for every marked location. No more dropping pins one by one.

Availability

AI plan import is available on the Business and Enterprise plans:

Business includes 20 plan analyses per month.
Enterprise quotas are custom — talk to us about what your projects need.

Detection runs on image maps (including maps converted from PDFs). Geo maps can't be analysed. Only organisation owners and admins can run a detection.

How to run a detection

There are three ways to start, all leading to the same flow:

From the map card — on your event's Maps tab, open the map card's ⋮ menu and choose Detect signs from plan.
Right after uploading — when a plan finishes uploading, a prompt offers Detect signs from plan. One click and you're off.
From the map editor — click the ✨ button in the editor toolbar.

Confirm in the dialog (it shows how many analyses you have left this month) and the analysis starts. It usually takes under two minutes — you can keep working while it runs, and if you leave the editor, a banner will be waiting when you come back.

What the AI detects

The AI reads the drawing the way a person would:

The legend — it works out which symbols on your plan represent signage.
Sign label chips and sign codes — the labelled markers architects place at each sign location (e.g. WC-A, EX-04, D1.2).
Sign symbols — marked locations for toilets, fire exits, accessible facilities, room IDs, directional signage, and more.

Every marked location becomes a proposed sign — including lower-confidence detections, so you can make the final call rather than the AI silently dropping things.

Reviewing detections

Nothing is created until you say so. When the analysis finishes, the map editor opens review mode:

Proposal pins appear on the map, styled differently from your real signs.
Drag a pin to adjust its position.
Rename any detection — names are pre-filled from the drawing's own sign codes.
Untick anything you don't want created.
Map categories to sign types — each detected category (toilets, fire exits, directional, and so on) can be matched to a sign type from your library, created as a new type, or skipped.
Possible duplicates — detections very close to a sign already plotted on the map are flagged and unticked by default, so re-running a detection won't double up your signs.

When you're happy, click Create N signs. The button shows the impact on your plan's sign limit before you commit.

What gets created

Each approved detection becomes a placeholder sign that is:

Already plotted on the map at the detected position
Named from the drawing using its sign code or label
Status pending, with a fresh sign number and QR code
Set up with its sign type's default faces, ready for artwork and details

From there it's a normal sign — add artwork, dimensions, and instructions, or assign it to contractors like any other. See Adding Signs to Events and Placing Signs on Maps.

On events using assigned mode, newly created signs aren't visible to contractors until you assign them — the same as every other way of creating signs.

Getting the best results

Upload the PDF directly rather than a screenshot or photo — PDF pages are converted at high resolution, which gives the AI the clearest view. See Uploading PDF Maps.
A legible legend helps. The AI reads your plan's legend to understand its symbology, so plans with a clear legend detect best.
Very large sheets (A0/A1) may lose detail. Converted maps are capped in resolution, so tiny symbols on huge sheets can blur. If a big sheet detects poorly, try a plan split into smaller areas or pages.

Quota and monthly reset

Your quota works on a rolling 30-day window: each analysis counts against the last 30 days, and older runs stop counting as they age out — there's no first-of-the-month reset. Every analysis you run counts toward the quota, whether or not you create signs from it. The kickoff dialog always shows how many analyses you have left, and if you're at the cap it tells you how many days until one frees up.

How your plan is processed

To perform the detection, the uploaded plan image is processed by our AI provider, Anthropic (Claude). Only the map image is sent, and it's used solely to analyse the plan and return the detections. See our Privacy Policy for details.