Place and export
Placing
Section titled “Placing”A metes-and-bounds description defines shape, not location, so placement comes in three ways.
- PLSS aliquot tracts already know where they are. One click places them, georeferenced from BLM’s public survey fabric.
- Metes-and-bounds tracts take one click on the point of beginning, typically on your county parcel layer. A live preview follows the cursor; adjust rotation if the deed’s bearing basis differs from your grid north, then confirm.
- Composite conveyances, where two or more tracts tie to the same commencement monument, place as a group. One click places every tract at the offset its own tie courses describe, and rotation turns the assembly as a unit. Per-tract placement stays available.
A 1984 Denver deed carrying six tracts, every tie chain starting at the Southeast Corner of Block 1.
The parcel and its five easement strips, each at the position its tie courses describe from the clicked corner.
A placed tract is a polygon plus one line feature per call, each carrying its bearing, distance, confidence and source sentence.
Exporting
Section titled “Exporting”Save GeoPackage… writes every placed tract as a polygon layer (verdict, closure, acreage, provenance attributes) plus a per-call line layer. The deed’s metadata rides along.
Save DXF… writes the traverse for CAD. Unplaced by design: point of beginning at the origin, distances in feet, because a deed describes a shape rather than a location and the operator sets the basis. Curves come through as true arcs, and every course carries its verbatim deed text. The button disables itself when no tract in the document has computed geometry.
Save certificate… writes the GroundTruth Certificate of Digitization.
Copy JSON puts the raw extraction on the clipboard.
All four are written by the service rather than the plugin, so they are byte for byte the files the browser and the API produce.