Availability: All plans
The manual plotting editor has no save button, and that is not a missing feature. There is no need to save your work: Trace redraws the whole document as you type, and saves in the background every time you make a change. Understanding what gets saved, and when, explains most of what the editor does that looks surprising.
The document saves itself on every pause
About eight tenths of a second after you stop typing, BoundaryLogic Trace saves. There is nothing to remember and nothing to press. The save status badge on the editor toolbar follows each save through three steps: waiting, saving, then saved. While a change is waiting or still saving, the browser’s own leave site confirmation appears if you try to close the tab, which is the one place the work can be lost.
Each tract is saved as its own legal description
A document can hold many tracts, and each one is stored as a separate legal description on the project. Trace saves three things for each: its calls, how its geometry was produced, and the text you typed. That is why the map, the layers page and the exports all see the same boundary you are looking at in the editor.
A newly typed tract becomes a legal description the first time Trace reads it cleanly and it has calls. Before that it exists only as text on your screen.
An unparseable tract is never saved
A tract Trace cannot read is not written to the project, so a half typed call cannot overwrite geometry that was already good. This is the rule that makes it safe to type a description straight through: the half finished versions, where a bearing is partly entered and the traverse is briefly nonsense, never reach the project.
It also explains a pause. If the badge sits on Unsaved changes while you are mid-call, the error icon beside the line usually shows why.
A text only edit is saved cheaply
Adding a comment, inserting a blank line or prefixing a call with # to omit it changes what the document says without changing what it draws. Trace stores just the text for those and does not rebuild the drawing. Nothing about your geometry is touched.
Trace matches blocks to tracts through an edit
Editing text is a blunt operation: a rename moves the header, a reorder moves whole blocks, and an edit changes the calls under one. Trace resolves which stored description a block belongs to by its calls first, then by its name, then by its position. That ordering is why renaming a tract renames the existing description across the project rather than creating a second one, and why reordering blocks does not leave duplicates behind.
Two edits work the same way. Renaming a tract by editing its &( header renames its legal description everywhere. Dragging a tract on the plot sheet writes a new centre point, so it lands in the same place on the project map next time.
Reopening replays what you typed
Each tract’s stored text is replayed verbatim when you open the document again, so comments, spacing, unit suffixes and aliquot shorthand come back exactly as written. Your layout is part of the record, not something Trace redraws.
Three cases deliberately break that replay, each because there is no typed text to honour.
| Case | What Trace writes instead |
|---|---|
| The calls changed outside the editor | A rebuilt block, keeping the typed line of every call that survived the change |
| The description was plotted by AI and never edited here | One canonical call line per stored call, curves included, so it is readable and correctable as text |
| A stored call cannot be expressed in the syntax | A comment naming what is missing, in place of that call |
| A stored origin has drifted more than half a foot from the description’s centre point | A rewritten origin, so the two agree |
Because a rebuild is itself a change, opening a document can save it. The badge can read Saved before you have typed anything, and that is expected rather than a fault. Saving and sync covers what to do when one of these surprises you.
What this means in practice
Take the five calls of a metes and bounds description typed into one document. As soon as Trace reads the tract, it exists on the project as one legal description, visible on the map and available to every export, with your typed text stored beside the geometry. Add a second tract under its own header and it becomes a second description in the same document. Delete a block and its description is gone from the project, immediately and without a confirmation, because deleting the block is the delete gesture.
None of this costs credits. Manual plotting is free forever, on every plan, and only AI Automated Plotting consumes them. Credits and AI plots covers what does.
Related
- Saving and sync, for a save that failed or text that came back rewritten
- The manual plotting workspace, for the save status badge and the toolbar
- Deed syntax reference, for comments, omitted calls and tract headers
- Credits and AI plots, for what does use credits