Read your description before you upload it

Availability: All plans. Role: edit access on the project.

Read the description once, before you spend a credit on it, and you will know what Trace will do with it. This takes about a minute and needs nothing but the description in front of you.

Before you start

• Have the full legal description where you can read it, not just the first page.
• Nothing needs to be open in Trace. This is a read of the document.

Steps

1. Find the courses. Read the description through once looking only for the runs of the boundary: the lines that carry a direction and a distance. Ignore the recitals, the parties and the exceptions for now.
2. Check that every course gives both. A direction can be a bearing such as N 42 15 30 E, an azimuth, or an angle turned off the course before it. A curve counts if it gives a radius and one more figure, such as an arc length or a central angle. If every course gives a direction and a distance, the description plots. Skip to step 6.
3. Mark the courses that are missing one. These are the ones Trace will leave out. Each has a known shape:
   • a run along a creek, a river or a shoreline, with no direction or distance for that run
   • a run along a neighbour’s line, described only by whose land it is
   • a run along a street or a right of way, named but not measured
   • a line taken from another deed, given as a book and page
   • a run to a corner of a section, giving a direction and leaving the distance to the grid
   • a position given as a station and an offset

   Read Calls that reference something Trace cannot see for what to do with each.

4. Check whether there is any course at all. A lot, a block and a subdivision name with a plat reference carries none. Neither does an area and a general position, such as five acres in the northwest corner. Nothing will plot and no retry changes it. Never type a lot and block line into the manual plotting editor: written with commas it draws a full 640 acre section and reports it closed. Lot and block descriptions covers the honest routes.
5. Check the curves. One arc per course plots. A spiral does not plot at all. A compound or reverse curve written as a single course needs splitting into one course per arc, which does plot. See Curves Trace cannot plot as written.
6. Find how the description reaches the ground. A coordinate, a street address or a PLSS corner places it. A monument, an adjoiner, a street name or a recorded document does not, and the tract will plot correctly and sit unplaced until you place it. That is not a bad plot. See My plot is in the wrong place.
7. Count the courses you expect. Write the number down before you plot. Trace does not compare what it read against the document you are holding, so this count is the only thing that catches a course going missing.

What to do with what you found

The two things people get wrong

• The costly description is not the one that fails. A total failure gives you nothing and is obvious. A description that half succeeds comes back as a drawn boundary that looks finished, with one line quietly absent.
• A closure reading of Closed is not proof the whole description was read. It only says the courses Trace read come back to where they started. A course left out can still leave it reading Closed, in green. The error markers beside the lines are what flag a missing course. See When a call will not plot.

Related

• What Trace can and cannot plot, for the four outcomes this check sorts into
• How to tell if a deed will plot, the same check walked through on a real description
• Plot from a document, for uploading or pasting once the read is done
• Credits and plots, for what a pass through the AI costs