Plot a deed from a PDF

What a recorded deed PDF actually is

A deed pulled from a register of deeds is rarely a clean digital file. It is a scan of a paper instrument: a recording stamp across the first page, a notary seal over part of the text, sometimes three tracts and a SAVE AND EXCEPT carve-out in one instrument. County portals serve these as image PDFs and TIFFs at whatever resolution the scanner produced, usually with no text layer at all. That last detail is why the copy-paste workflow breaks: there is nothing to copy.

Traditional deed plotters assume you bridge that gap by hand. You read the legal description, type each bearing and distance into a form, and eyeball whether the figure closes. Some tools parse calls out of text you paste in, which helps exactly when the description is already digital and cleanly worded, and not at all when it is a 1974 scan. Easting takes both: paste the description when a title commitment already hands it to you as text, or upload the scan when there is nothing to copy. Either way the traverse is recomputed and verified, and the certificate names which source it read.

What Easting does with it

You hand Easting the PDF, scan and all. PDF, TIFF, PNG, and JPEG all work, up to 32 MB, and every uploaded document is deleted the moment it is read. A vision model reads the legal description and extracts every boundary call, each with the verbatim sentence it came from, so nothing rests on an embedded text layer the scan does not have. Multi-tract instruments come back as separate tracts, and carve-outs are read as carve-outs.

Then the part that makes the plot trustworthy: deterministic software recomputes the traverse from those calls and checks two independent signals. The boundary must close within 1:5,000, and the computed area must corroborate the acreage the deed itself states within 2%. Only then does the parcel draw, in your browser or in QGIS, on a real basemap, as a polygon plus a per-call line layer. The result exports to GeoPackage and DXF, and a signed GroundTruth certificate carries the verdict, the drawn figure, and the full call table with every course's source text.

When a description will not verify, you get the misclosure, the suspect courses, and the source text instead of a quiet wrong answer. Descriptions are wrong more often than people expect, and a plot typed from a bad description inherits the error silently; GroundTruth has the corpus evidence, including the verdicts that overruled our own hand-annotated reference geometry.

Where this approach has limits

Honesty first: Easting reads typed and printed documents, not cursive handwriting. A pre-typewriter deed book page needs Deed Reader Pro, which transcribes handwritten instruments and is the right tool for that job. A description that exists only as drawn linework on a plat, with no printed courses, is identified rather than traced, because tracing a drawing at county-scan resolution would produce geometry the document cannot support. And a metes-and-bounds deed defines shape, not position: you place the parcel by clicking its point of beginning, and the verification covers the geometry, never the click.

Try it on your own document

Three documents are free, with no card, and failed extractions are never billed. Open the county PDF in your browser at app.easting.ai, which reads it, verifies it, and puts the parcel on a map with nothing to install, or add the Easting plugin from the QGIS plugin manager if your work lives in a QGIS project. The step-by-step guide covers both. If you plot only a few deeds a year, the $30 pack of ten never-expiring credits covers you without a subscription. Comparing tools? The comparison page puts Easting beside the desktop plotters and the other AI readers, including where each of them wins.