What is CAD Technician mode in PDFDepth?

The fix that costs a round trip

Most post-issue drafting is not design work. A wall that needs shifting four feet, a door opening that has to move, an anchor-bolt grid to add to a pad, a dimension string to redo at the right offset — twenty minutes of technician time, every time, because the person who needs it does not have a CAD seat open and the drafter who does is working from a marked-up PDF on a second monitor.

CAD Mode already put the drafting vocabulary in the right panel. CAD Technician is the next step: instead of working the commands yourself, you describe the outcome and a trained-technician workflow executes it — plan first, preview before commit, exact math at the drawing's own scale.

How a run works

• Set the scale — pick a preset (1/4" = 1'-0", 3/16" = 1'-0", 1" = 20', 1:100, and more) computed exactly from the sheet size, run Auto-detect scale against the title block, or calibrate two points on a known dimension.
• Select the target — marquee-select the PDF's own linework (turn on Select PDF linework) or your existing markups. The technician only operates on what you selected.
• Type the instruction in real units — "draw a 10'x12' equipment pad 5 ft south of the selection," "array the anchor bolt in a 6x6 grid at 3'-0" spacing," "add a leader: W18x35." Feet-inches, fractions, and metric all parse.
• Review the ghost preview — new geometry draws in dashed cyan; geometry that will change or disappear draws in faint dashed red, with a numbered list of the operations. Enter accepts, Escape cancels.
• Accept and move on — the whole plan lands as one undo step, and everything it drew is an ordinary, editable markup on the sheet.

The AI plans — it never does the math

This is the design rule that makes CAD Technician trustworthy. The AI's only job is translating your instruction into a plan: which operations, in which order, with which parameters — lengths copied verbatim from what you typed, in your units. It never computes a coordinate, a distance, or an angle.

A deterministic engine then does all the arithmetic at the calibrated scale: anchor resolution against the selection, offsets around concave corners, door-opening cuts that split a wall line into head and tail pieces, rotation and mirroring. If a length cannot be parsed, the operation fails honestly instead of guessing. If the instruction is ambiguous — no selection when one is needed, a missing dimension — the AI returns a clarifying question rather than a wrong drawing.

And because the geometry is computed, not hallucinated, the preview is accurate down to the pixel. What you see in the dashed cyan is exactly what you get.

What it can draw and do

The vocabulary covers the daily technician set. Editing: move, copy, rotate, scale, mirror, offset (including L-shaped outlines with correct inner corners), and erase. Drawing: lines, polylines, rectangles, and circles placed relative to the selection — a pad 5 ft south of a wall — plus point grids for anchor bolts and piers, and door or window openings cut into wall lines with a swing arc. Annotation: text, leaders, and dimensions at the calibrated scale. Every new object lands on a named CAD layer (A-WALL, A-DOOR, A-ANNO-DIMS, and the like) so the export is organized like a real drawing.

Instructions chain, too: an operation can target what the previous operation just produced, so "offset the selection outward 6 inches, then mirror the result about the selection's centerline" plans as two steps in one run.

New sheets and real exports

CAD Technician also creates blank drawings: pick a sheet size — ARCH D, ANSI C, ISO A1 and more — portrait or landscape, plus a scale preset, and a new CAD tab opens calibrated and ready. It is the fastest way to sketch a detail or an as-built at a known scale.

Export is where the loop closes. "Export sheet to DXF" writes the whole sheet — the PDF's own surviving linework, its text, and every markup and edit — at real drawing units with proper layers, not a picture of lines. "Export sheet to DWG" runs the same geometry through a server-side conversion and hands back a DWG binary. And a scanned page that has no linework at all can go through the Convert scanned page path first, then into the same workflow.

Where it earns its keep

• Drafters clearing redline sets: the "move this wall, offset that footing, cut this opening" instructions arrive as text — now they execute as text, on the issued sheet.
• Engineers sketching for an RFI response: a dimensioned detail or an added opening drawn at scale in a minute, exported to DXF for the record.
• PMs and supers marking up field conditions: "show the new door 4'-0" left of grid B" — a precise, reviewable change instead of a freehand scrawl.
• Takeoff and QTO prep: array the bolt grid, dimension the pad, label the beam — clean geometry that exports to CAD for coordination.
• Anyone starting a detail from scratch: a scaled blank sheet, typed instructions, and a DWG out the other end.

Honest limits

CAD Technician works one sheet at a time and does not yet snap to object endpoints and intersections the way the command line does — the CAD Mode commands remain the tool for vertex-level manual work. The preview step exists because the AI can mis-plan: read it before accepting. And it is deliberately not a from-scratch generator — asking for "a complete three-bedroom plan" gets a suggestion to start with a specific element, because real drafting is constraint-driven, not prompt-driven.

DWG export is a paid-tier feature with a daily conversion limit, and the DXF/DWG you get is markup-level geometry on the deliverable — the authoritative model still lives in the source CAD file. For the corrections, openings, details, and as-builts that happen after the drawing is issued, the right panel is now the whole loop.