Plan & PDF Annotation in Kraaft | Mark Up Drawings From the Field

Mark up a plan without leaving Kraaft

Plans are the most-opened document on any job site, and until now they were read-only. You could open the PDF, zoom in, pinch around looking for the right detail. That was it. The moment you needed to circle a conflict, highlight the section your crew finished, or flag a change for the office, you were out of the app.

Plan and PDF annotation is now live in Kraaft. Open a plan, draw on it, and everyone on the project sees it.

The four-step workaround nobody finished

The old path went like this: open the plan in Kraaft, download it, open it again in a separate markup app, annotate, save, then re-upload to the right conversation. Four steps, two apps, and a file that now exists in two places with no guarantee the crew is looking at the current one.

Most people abandoned it somewhere in the middle. The information didn't disappear, it just landed somewhere worse. A text message. A photo of a laptop screen. A verbal handoff at the trailer that nobody wrote down. The plan itself stayed clean and out of date.

Draw, highlight, erase

The annotation toolbar keeps it to what actually gets used on site:

Pen. Freehand drawing in high-visibility colors, with stroke weight that scales to your zoom level so a line drawn zoomed-in doesn't turn into a smear when you zoom back out.

Highlighter. A thicker, semi-transparent stroke in softer colors. The most common use we see is progress tracking: highlight a zone green as it's completed, so anyone opening the plan can read status at a glance.

Eraser. Touch a stroke to remove it, including someone else's. No selecting, no menus.

Undo. Reverses your last action during your annotation session.

One plan, one layer, everybody on it

Annotations don't create a copy of the file. There's a single shared layer on the plan, and when you close it your marks appear for everyone on the project.

That's the part that makes it useful past the individual. A superintendent circles a conflict at 7am, the foreman opens the same plan at 9am and sees the circle, not a forwarded attachment named plan_v3_FINAL_2.pdf. A history panel lists each annotation with who made it and when, so you can trace any mark back to a person and a time, and delete one if it's no longer relevant.

Send a snapshot to the crew

Zoom to the area you care about, mark it up, and send a snapshot straight into the conversation. It captures exactly what's on your screen, so the message shows the detail in question instead of a full-sheet PDF the other person has to hunt through.

The snapshot carries the author and date with it, so the chat keeps a record alongside the plan.

Annotations survive the export

When you export the plan, your drawings and highlights are flattened into the PDF. What the office opens is what the field drew, no Kraaft account required to read it.

Getting started

Annotation is available in the Kraaft web app and on iOS. Open any plan in a project, tap the annotation tool, and start drawing. There's nothing to enable and no separate license.

If your crews are still round-tripping plans through a second app, this is the workflow that replaces it. Start a free trial at kraaft.co or book a walkthrough with our team.