Availability: All plans. Role: edit access on the project.
What you are seeing
A document in the queue sits under Failed Documents with a red banner reading Error - Unplottable, then this:
We have failed to identify any legal descriptions. Please try again, enter as text or manually plot your document.
Under it, a full width Try Again button, and a delete control at the top right of the card.
A document that stopped part way through instead reports its status as Error on the queue card, with the reason beside it. Where no reason came back it reads “An error occurred while processing the document. Please try again or contact support.”
Why it happens
Trace calls a document unplottable when the AI pass finished and found no legal description in it at all. Usually the scan could not read the page well enough, or the description is not laid out where the AI expected it, or the page holds a form or an exhibit rather than a description. A description Trace read but does not expect to plot correctly is a different thing: that comes back processed, with a warning, and is covered in the document queue.
Fix it
- On the failed card, click Try Again. The Help Guide the AI dialog opens.
- In Additional Guidance for AI, tell the AI what it missed. Point at where the description sits, or name the notation. The dialog’s own examples are the right shape: “The legal description starts after the granting clause”, or “The bearings use old notation format”.
- Click Try Again with Guidance. Trace re-runs the document with what you wrote and spends a credit.
- Optional: click Skip Guidance to re-run with no guidance at all. Worth one pass if the first run looks like a transient failure rather than a hard one. It spends a credit too.
The card’s AI Attempts count goes up on every pass, so you can see how many you have spent on one document.
Retrying from the map instead
A description already on the map that plotted from the wrong part of a document does not need the queue. Open Manage Layers, find its card, and pick Try Document Again from its More actions menu. The same Help Guide the AI dialog opens and the same credit is spent.
When retrying will not help
The steps above assume the description is in the document and Trace missed it. Sometimes it is not. Some descriptions carry nothing for Trace to build a boundary from, and no amount of guidance changes that, because the measurements are not in the words.
Retrying is wasted on any of these. Each has an article covering what to do instead.
| What the description does | Read |
|---|---|
| Names a lot, a block and a subdivision with no courses anywhere | Lot and block descriptions |
| Runs along a creek, a neighbour’s line, a street, a section corner or a line in another deed | Calls that reference something Trace cannot see |
| Carries a spiral curve, or two arcs written as one course | Curves Trace cannot plot as written |
| Gives positions as stations and offsets | Calls that reference something Trace cannot see |
| Gives an area and a general position, such as five acres in the northwest corner | Nothing plots from it. An area and a corner do not fix a boundary. |
The harder case is the one that does not fail. A description carrying one of these among otherwise good courses comes back processed rather than failed, because the other courses still make a boundary. You get a plot that looks finished with one line quietly absent. What Trace can and cannot plot sets out all four outcomes, and Read your description before you upload it is the minute of reading that catches them first.
If that did not work
Two more passes with different guidance is usually the limit worth spending. After that:
- Paste the description instead. Open the page you can read, copy the description out of it, and use Textual Legal Description on the Add Document pane. Skipping the scan removes the most common cause of the failure. See Plot from a document.
- Type it by hand. Manually Plot Deed opens the editor, which spends no credits and plots anything the syntax covers. See the manual plotting workspace and the deed syntax reference.
- Delete the document. The delete control on the failed card removes it after a confirmation. Credits already spent are not returned.
- Tell us about the document. Help In the project menu sends a message with the page you are on attached. A description that should plot and does not is worth reporting.
When the failure is credits, not the document
Processing stops with a dialog rather than a failed card when the team has no credit for the pass. Which dialog depends on the reason: out of credits, at the monthly maximum, or pay-as-you-go switched off for your seat. Manual plotting keeps working in all three. Credits and plots and Pay as you go cover the fix, and only an owner or admin can make it.
Related
- The document queue, for the three processing steps and the plotting warnings
- Plot from a document, for pasting text and the manual route
- Manage layers, for Try Document Again on a plotted description
- Credits and plots, for what each attempt costs
- Help and support, for reporting a document