Turn CAD and PDF floor plans into an interactive indoor map
DigiMaps reads DXF drawings directly, with no AI involved, and turns the layers and room labels into floors you then edit, route and publish in Studio. DWG files go through a converter first. PDFs and images can be traced with AI-assisted tracing, which proposes room outlines for your team to review.
Ground floor of Wayvale General Hospital, a fictional demo venue. On the left, the floor as a CAD drawing with coloured layers, door swings, stair treads and room text. On the right, the same floor after import: rooms filled by category, door gaps, lifts, stairs and restrooms, with staff-only rooms hatched.
From drawing to routable map, in three passes.
The same ground floor at each stage. The drawing stays in layers until rooms become places with categories, and places only become routable once the doorways are turned into a route network.
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1 · Read the drawing
Layers, double-line walls, door swings, stairs, lift shafts and the room text, as your architect drew them.
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2 · Rooms become places
Room text is matched to the industry pack’s categories: “WC” becomes Restrooms. In hospitals, unknown room types stay staff-only until someone decides.
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3 · Doors become routes
Studio generates the route network from the doorways. Lifts, stairs and exits join it, and every direction a visitor gets follows it.
Label matching handles Arabic, Persian and Urdu letter variants and digits. The hospital pack’s rules are tested against 412 de-identified hospital CAD labels.
Formats we accept, and how well each one works.
A layered DXF gives the cleanest result. A scanned PDF gives a draft that a person has to finish. The Result column says which of the two you should expect.
| Format | How it comes in | Result | What to know |
|---|---|---|---|
| DXF .dxf | Upload in Studio | Best route | Read natively, with no AI. Layered drawings with text labels in the rooms give the cleanest result. Works on-premises and air-gapped. |
| AutoCAD DWG .dwg | Upload in Studio | Via a converter | Converted on the server by the ODA File Converter, which has to be installed there. Saving as DXF in AutoCAD first skips that step. |
| IFC / BIM .ifc, .ifczip | On request | By our team | Floors come from building storeys and rooms from IFC spaces. Runs on Linux servers. |
| IMDF .zip | Send it to us | By our team | Our team brings it in as a venue you then edit in Studio. Studio itself exports IMDF. |
| GeoJSON .geojson | Send it to us | By our team | Same route as IMDF. Useful for exports from GIS tools. |
| PDF .pdf | AI-assisted tracing | Draft for review | First page of the file only. Proposed rooms go to a review queue. Needs AI switched on. |
| Images .png, .jpg, .webp, .tiff, .bmp | AI-assisted tracing, or trace by hand | Draft for review | Or drop the image in as an underlay and draw over it with the editor tools, no AI needed. |
Step by step from AutoCAD: our DWG to interactive map guide
Measure one wall to set the scale.
A plan traced from a PDF or a photo has the right shapes and no real size. Pick a wall you know, type its length, and the whole venue snaps to true scale.
- Local metres
- For CAD files and plan-only venues. Every distance and direction is in real metres.
- WGS84
- For georeferenced campuses, so buildings sit in the right place on the ground.
AI tracing drafts. Your team decides.
AI-assisted floor-plan tracing proposes room outlines that your team reviews and completes. It can be switched off, and is off by default on-prem.
- It reads rooms, doors, amenities and labels, and gives each proposal a confidence level.
- Nothing reaches the map until someone approves it. Rooms it misses, you draw.
- It sends the plan to a third-party AI model, which is why it is off by default on your own server.
- Treat it as a head start on drawing. We don’t quote accuracy figures for it.
Or send us the whole drawing set.
For big sites, our team converts the CAD set for you: every building and floor in one venue, checked before it reaches your Studio. When the architect issues new drawings, we re-import and your Studio edits are kept.
IMDF, GeoJSON and IFC files come in the same way.
- extract3 DXF files → 1 building, 3 levelsdone
- classifyRoom text → hospital pack categoriesdone
- graphDoors, corridors, lifts, stairs → route networkdone
- qaEvery public destination reachable from every kioskpass
- privacyStaff-only rooms removed from the public mappass
- importStudio edits since the last import keptdone
What your team still does in Studio.
An import gets you a floor. These steps get you a map you would put in front of a visitor. Each one happens in the same editor, in draft, before anything is published.
- Check the floor against the drawing. Draw in 2D, look in 3D, fix any wall the import misread.
- Name every place. In each venue language, a whole floor in one pass, then approve.
- Build the routes. Generate the route network from the doors, then link lifts, stairs and escalators between floors.
- Mark exits and step-free entrances. Emergency guidance only uses exits you have approved.
- Run preflight. It flags problems such as a room nobody can reach or a stair that goes nowhere. Critical ones block the publish.
- Review and publish. A colleague approves, and every screen gets the new release.
What comes in can go back out.
Every venue exports as IMDF, GeoJSON or KML from Studio, so the work you put into the map is never locked in. Exports are not checked against Apple’s IMDF validator, so validate the file yourself before you submit it to Apple.
In
- DXF
- DWG
- PNG · JPG
- IFC
- IMDF
- GeoJSON
Dashed: brought in by our team
Out
- venue.imdf.zip IMDF
- venue.geojson GeoJSON
- venue.kml KML
Questions about importing floor plans
Can DigiMaps import AutoCAD DWG files?
Yes, through a converter. The server converts DWG with the ODA File Converter, which has to be installed on it, or you save the drawing as DXF in AutoCAD and upload that. DXF is the most reliable route: DigiMaps reads it natively, with no AI involved.
Can you turn a PDF floor plan into an interactive map?
Yes, with AI-assisted tracing. It proposes room outlines, doors and labels from the first page of the PDF, and your team reviews and completes each one before anything is published. It can be switched off, and is off by default on-premises.
Our drawings have no scale. Is that a problem?
No. Pick a wall you know the length of and enter it, and the whole plan rescales to true size. From then on, distances in directions are in real metres.
Can we import IMDF or GeoJSON from another system?
Yes, but our team does it for you rather than an upload button in Studio. Send us the files and we bring them in as a venue you then edit in Studio. Studio exports IMDF, GeoJSON and KML at any time.
Do we have to use AI to build our map?
No. DXF import, hand tracing over an image underlay and all the drawing tools work with AI switched off. That matters on on-premises and air-gapped sites, where AI is off by default.
How long does it take to convert our floor plans?
It depends on the drawings: how many floors there are, whether rooms carry text labels and whether doors are drawn. Clean DXF files with labelled rooms are quickest. We agree the timeline with you after looking at one floor.
Bring one floor plan to a demo
Send a DXF, DWG or PDF of one floor before a 30-minute call. We will look at it with you, tell you which import route fits, and what your team would still need to check before visitors see it.