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.
Suggested locations
Section titled “Suggested locations”Suggest locations… asks the service where a document’s tracts sit. Two things can answer.
A PLSS corner: the description commences at a section or aliquot corner the public survey fabric can resolve, and the tie chain walks from there.
An adjoining parcel: the deed describes a boundary you have already placed, from the other side. A course running “N 75° W, 11 chains 85 links to the lands of White” against a placed White deed running “S 75° E, 11 chains 85 links” back along it is the same line described twice, and that pair fixes both the point of beginning and the rotation.
The match has to be corroborated before it is offered. A length and a reciprocal bearing on their own are a coincidence, since the same 200-foot line appears all over a township, so either the deed names the neighbour’s grantor or grantee in its adjoiner text, or the next course round agrees too and the shared boundary turns a corner. The two parcels also have to end up on opposite sides of the line they share, which is what stops a deed being laid on top of its neighbour.
Both are suggestions and neither places anything. The card says what was compared, the parcel is previewed where the service thinks it goes, and the placement happens when you confirm it. Suggestions get better as you place more: the first deed in a county has nothing to adjoin, and the twelfth usually does.
Placement is remembered
Section titled “Placement is remembered”Where you put a tract is saved when you confirm it, so reopening that document through History… draws it back where you left it, rotation included. The point of beginning is stored in latitude and longitude, which means a deed placed in QGIS opens in the same field in the browser and the other way round.
Nothing about the position is part of the extraction or the certificate, and that is deliberate. A verdict is the service’s claim about arithmetic it performed and can defend. Where a parcel sits on the earth is your claim, made from your knowledge of the ground, and signing it would put our attestation behind a judgement we never checked. The position rides beside the result instead.
Aliquot tracts are not stored, because they are not placed by hand: the PLSS fabric locates them and does so again on the next open.
To drop a saved position without deleting the extraction, use Forget placement on the run at app.easting.ai. Deleting the result takes its positions with it.
Your fabric: every parcel at once
Section titled “Your fabric: every parcel at once”History… → Add fabric to map puts every parcel this key has located onto your project as one layer, in WGS 84, however many separate documents they came from. A county’s worth of deeds run one at a time is a map rather than eleven exports.
Two layers arrive. parcels carries one polygon per located tract with its
verdict, closure, acreage, the document and run it came from, and when it was
placed. parcel_boundaries carries each course with its bearing, distance,
monument, adjoiner and the sentence it was read from, which is what makes the
file useful for chain work rather than only for looking at.
located_by says how a parcel got there: operator for one you placed by
hand, plss for an aliquot tract the survey fabric located. Those are
different kinds of claim, and the layer keeps them apart rather than drawing
a map that looks equally confident about both.
Nothing is extracted and nothing is billed. The file is written beside your QGIS profile, so a project that references it still opens tomorrow.
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.