Uploading PDF plans for AI analysis

Plan uploads are the single most valuable thing you do in Buildra in the first week. The plan set becomes the project's reference document for AI Q&A, spec-conflict detection, and the page-cited answers that show up across the app. The faster you upload, the sooner everything else gets smart.

What Buildra accepts

• Format: PDF only. We do not support DWG or RVT directly — export to PDF first.
• Size: Up to 500 MB per file, up to 200 pages per file.
• Page orientation: Any. Mixed orientations in a single PDF are fine.
• OCR: Buildra runs OCR on every page automatically. Scanned PDFs work; native-vector PDFs work better.

The upload flow

1. Open the project, click Plans in the sidebar.
2. Drag your PDF onto the dropzone, or click Upload plan and pick the file.
3. Tag it with a discipline (Architectural, Structural, MEP, Civil) and a revision label (R1, R2, “Bid set”, etc.).
4. Click Upload. The upload runs in the background and the status badge shows “Processing” while AI indexing completes.

Indexing typically takes 2–5 minutes for a 100-page set. You can navigate away — Buildra keeps processing and emails you when the index is ready.

Tip:Upload the bid set first, even if it is not the latest revision. Buildra indexes by revision; later uploads of the same plan are tracked as a version chain. This means you can ask questions across revisions later (“What changed in the kitchen between R1 and R3?”) without breaking the older references.

What gets indexed

For each page, Buildra extracts the text (via OCR or native parsing), captures the page title block, identifies discipline-specific sheet metadata (e.g. A-101, S-300), and runs a structural pass to identify dimensions, notes, and detail callouts. All of that becomes searchable from Ask Buildra.

Versioning

Re-uploading a plan set that has the same filename as an existing one triggers our versioning dialog. You can either replace the old set (lose the prior version) or create a new revision (keeps both, indexed separately). New revision is almost always the right choice — the storage cost is trivial and you gain the cross-revision query.

Troubleshooting

• Upload stuck at 99%: The transfer is done; we are generating the page thumbnails. Wait 60 seconds and refresh.
• OCR confidence low: If a scan was done at less than 200 DPI we flag it in the plan list. Either re-scan at higher resolution or use the Notes field to capture the key info manually.
• File rejected:The most common reason is a password-protected PDF. Remove the password (Acrobat → File → Properties → Security) and retry.