All articles · 2026-09-18

Clean floor plans for listings, brochures and boards

Floor plans get reused at every size, from a phone listing to an A1 board. How to turn a scanned or screenshotted plan into line work that stays sharp everywhere.

A floor plan is drawn once and then used everywhere: a thumbnail on a listing, a half-page in a brochure, an A1 board in the window. The copy most agents have is a screenshot of a PDF, which is fine at thumbnail size and falls apart at every size above it.

A simple floor plan outline with internal walls: on the left grey, uneven lines from a screenshot; on the right even black walls with square corners.
Left: a 200-pixel screenshot, JPEG quality 62. Right: Line art mode, two colours. 1 path, 24 nodes — walls of even weight, corners that are actually square.

Why corners are the tell

Nobody consciously notices a clean floor plan, but everybody notices a rough one — and the place it shows first is the corners, where two walls meet. In a screenshot that junction is a small grey patch. Printed at A1 it is a smudge the size of a fingernail.

A wall corner magnified: on the left a grey blurred junction; on the right two straight walls meeting at a clean right angle.
An external corner. The difference between these two is the difference between a plan that looks drawn and one that looks photocopied.

What to do before you trace

  • Start from the largest copy available — ask for the original PDF before screenshotting one
  • Crop away the border, the compass rose and the agent logo; all of them trace as line work
  • Two colours: walls and paper
  • Keep the room labels out of the trace and set them as real text afterwards, where they stay readable at every size

A traced plan is a drawing, not a survey. It reproduces the lines in your file faithfully — it does not correct a plan that was wrong, and the dimensions printed on it are only as true as the copy you started from.