Large Format Scanning and Digitizing

Old drawings that have lived in a tube for thirty years are a normal part of this work. Sheets get relaxed flat before capture rather than forced, and anything brittle, torn, taped, or on sepia or vellum stock is handled by hand instead of being pushed through a feeder. Blue-line and diazo prints that have faded toward the background can often be recovered with adjusted capture settings.

We will tell you before the job if a particular sheet is too fragile to run and what the alternative looks like. Nothing gets trimmed, unmounted, or altered without your approval, and originals come back to you unless you ask us to destroy them securely once the digital set is verified.

TIFF, PDF, and JPEG are the usual three, and we will produce another format on request. TIFF is the common choice for archival masters and for anything headed into a CAD or plan management workflow, while multi-page PDF suits a full drawing set someone needs to page through on a laptop at a job site.

Whatever you pick, it opens with software your team already has. We are the only imaging service in the area that does not make you install a proprietary viewer, so there is no license to renew and no barrier when a drawing has to go out to a consultant, an owner, or a permitting office.

By the fields your firm searches on: project name or number, sheet number, discipline, revision, and date are the common set. A digital drawing is only useful if the right person can find the right revision, so the index gets built around your naming conventions before production starts.

Index data ships as an Excel or comma-delimited file, ready to import into a plan room or document management system. Since 1998 we have scanned over 100 million pages for Carolina businesses, a good share of it for architecture, engineering, and construction firms. Ask for a pilot on one project folder and confirm the structure before the full archive runs.