Importing Existing Plans (PDFs) into ArcSite

Summary: 

Many times, you may need to draw over existing plans or documents. In ArcSite you can upload those plans or images as PDFs and use those as the base for your drawing. 

There are two ways to bring in existing PDF plans:

1. Upload to the cloud account and then access in the app
2. Push the PDF locally from another app into the app

Solution #1 – Upload to the ArcSite cloud account

By uploading to your cloud account, plans will be automatically accessible from the iPad app itself.

Upload Steps

1. Navigate to https://user.arcsiteapp.com
2. Use your ArcSite credentials (the ones you log into ArcSite with) to log into the account
3. Choose the project (or create one) in which you want your plans to be.
4. Click the “Upload” button
5. Follow the steps provided

Accessing the plans in the app

1. After you have uploaded your PDF plans, as shown above, they will show up immediately in the app
2. They will need to be downloaded to the local iPad by tapping on the download icon ( See Below)
3. NOTE – Since the plans are not immediately downloaded, you need to be in an area with an internet connection to download them to the local iPad.

 

Solution #2 – Push the PDF locally from another app into the app 

 

 

Disadvantages of locally pushing PDFs into the app: 

While this seems to be an easier solution upfront, there are some disadvantages to this process.

If there is more than one page to the PDF, each page will have to be done separately. When done on the user-site, you can bulk load all pages.

Uploading the PDF via the User-site has several advantages

1. ArcSite will process the file to be more performant
2. You can later reload a new version of the PDF without changing with the work you have added
3. You can rename and rotate uploaded PDF