Availability: All plans. Role: edit access on the project.
What you are seeing
The manual plotting editor has no save button. The save status badge on the editor toolbar is the only report you get, and it is absent until the first save of the session. These are the states it shows.
| Badge reads | What it means |
|---|---|
| Unsaved changes | An edit is queued and has not gone yet |
| Saving… | A save is on its way |
| Saved, then Saved 12s ago, Saved 3m ago, Saved 2h ago | The last save landed, ageing as time passes |
| Sync failed | The last save did not land |
Hover the badge for its tooltip. While work is pending it reads Edits are queued and save automatically. After a failure it reads The last save failed. Your next edit will trigger another attempt.
The pill reads Sync failed
Why it happens. The save did not reach Trace. The queued edit is still in the editor, so nothing you typed is lost yet, but the project does not have it.
Fix it
- Leave the workspace open. Closing the tab is the one thing that discards the pending edit.
- Check your connection.
- Type anything in the editor, such as a space you then delete. Your next edit triggers another attempt, which is what the tooltip is telling you.
- Watch the badge go to Saving… and then to Saved.
If that did not work
Copy the editor text into a file before you close the tab, so the calls survive whatever the connection is doing. Then reload the workspace and paste it back. Help and support has the route to a person if the failure repeats.
The pill says Saved and you never typed anything
Why it happens. Opening a document can save it. Where a tract’s stored text is missing, or no longer matches the calls held on the project, BoundaryLogic Trace regenerates that text as the document loads, and the regenerated text syncs. The save is real and it is expected.
Nothing to fix. If you want to know what changed, read the tract’s lines against the record before you edit anything further.
The text came back different from what you typed
Why it happens. Reopening a document normally replays each tract’s stored text verbatim, so comments, spacing, unit suffixes and aliquot shorthand come back as written. Three cases break that on purpose.
| Case | What Trace does |
|---|---|
| The calls changed outside the editor, such as an AI reprocess of the document | Rebuilds the tract’s text, keeping the typed line of every call that survived |
| The legal description was plotted by AI and never edited here | Writes one canonical call line per stored call, curves included, so the tract is readable and correctable as text |
| A stored call cannot be expressed in the syntax | Writes a comment naming what is missing, in place of a call |
Fix it
- Read the rebuilt lines against the source description before editing. A rebuild keeps the geometry; it does not keep your layout.
- Retype any comment or spacing you want back. A line starting
//is ignored when plotting, so notes are safe to re-add anywhere. - Where a comment names an unsupported call, write the call in a form the editor accepts, or park it with a leading
#so it stays in the document and out of the traverse.
A tract moved between sessions
Why it happens. Trace stores each tract’s origin so it lands in the same place on the project map. Where a stored origin ends up more than half a foot from the legal description’s own centre point, Trace rewrites the origin on load so the two agree. On the plot sheet that reads as a small shift.
Nothing to fix, and the geometry did not change. Drag the tract on the plot sheet if you want it somewhere else; that rewrites the origin line to match.
Related
- How the editor saves your work, for what is being saved and when
- The manual plotting workspace, for the toolbar the badge sits on
- Deed syntax reference, for comments, omitted calls and the forms a rebuild writes