Large Format Drawing and Plan scanning Services
Drawing Scanning Service
High Resolution Flatbed Scanning up to 1200dpi.
- Monochrome, Greyscale and Colour Scanning.
Uncompressed TIFF and Compressed PDF/JPG Output.
- OCR Text Searchable PDF and PDF/A Files, Handwriting OCR Capture.
Large Format Flatbed Scanner.
Thick Media Capabilities Such as Foam Board.
TIFF, PDF, Jpeg Formats.
Vectorisation service to DWG or DXF CAD formats.
A4 to A0 + Size Drawing Scanning Sizes.
- Indexing Drawing Numbers, Issues, Sheet Numbers, Titles and Descriptions.
- Long Description and Title Capability.
- Fragile Drawing and Flatbed Capabilities.
- A3, A2, A1, A0, Oversized Drawing Scanning.
- Large Format Drawing Scanning Service.
- Architectural Drawing Scanning Service.
plan of action
How We
Do It
Introduction to our Drawing Scanning Services
Large Format Scanning & Drawing Digitisation Services
Professional Wide-Format Scanning for Blueprints, Maps, and Architectural Plans
Physical drawing racks, rolled blueprints, and oversized plan chests take up massive amounts of premium office space and leave vital technical data highly vulnerable to wear, tear, and physical damage. Scanning and Data Solutions offers specialist, high-resolution large format scanning services to accurately convert oversized technical documents into secure, crystal-clear digital files.
Whether you need to digitise a historical archive of legacy engineering drawings or require ongoing wide-format data capture for active construction assets, our state-of-the-art scanning bureau is equipped to handle oversized media of any age, size, or condition.
We provide secure wide-format document scanning for businesses throughout London, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Midlands and across the UK.
Comprehensive Large Format Document Capture
A standard multi-function office scanner simply cannot accommodate oversized technical documents. Our bureau utilizes advanced, production-grade wide-format scanners capable of capturing crisp, ultra-high-resolution images from flat, rolled, fragile, or bound originals, including:
- Architectural Plans & Building Blueprints: Seamless capture of fine structural lines, scale rulers, and multi-coloured revision layers.
- Engineering Drawings & CAD Plots: High-resolution digitisation of complex mechanical layouts, electrical schematics, and manufacturing schematics.
- Oversized Maps & Topographical Survey Plans: Precision scanning for utility networks, land deeds, estate layouts, and geographical maps.
- A3, A2, A1, and A0 Document Sizes: Full capability to handle standard British Standard (BS) paper sizes up to 1000mm+ wide, as well as non-standard legacy sheets.
Why Digitise Your Large Format Drawings?
- Protect Scaling and Metric Data: Our scanning hardware features precise edge-to-edge optical calibration, ensuring that relative scale, dimensions, and structural fine print are preserved perfectly with zero image warping.
- Instant Access via Searchable OCR: Stop wasting time unrolling dusty paper tubes. We process drawings using advanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to create fully text-searchable PDFs, allowing your team to search by drawing number, client name, or asset tag in seconds.
- Reclaim Premium Office Floor Space: Eliminate bulky plan chests, vertical drawing racks, and off-site archive costs. One single digital storage drive can securely replace an entire physical library.
- Seamless Integration with EDRMS & CAD: We output files in flexible formats—including high-quality PDF, PDF/A, TIFF, and JPEG—designed to import directly into your Document Management Systems or act as clean, digital underlays for CAD workflows.
full service
Large Format Drawing Scanning
Collection of Drawings
Data Preparation Barcode Generation
Scanning of Collection of Drawings
Indexing of scanned Collection of Drawings
Quality Control
File Verification
Encryption
Secure delivery of Data via USB, DVD and Cloud Services
Secure Document
Disposal & File
Deletion
Turn around times can be tailored the scanning project requirements. We do plenty of large scanning jobs and also plenty of small jobs.
The size of the drawings does not matter, our scanner will scan a drawing up to 42″ wide and there is little restriction on the length. Sorting drawings before scanning is also not necessary, the scanners have automatic sizing systems, so scanning an A0 sheet, followed by an A3, A2 and then an E size is not a problem. The scans can be indexed with the drawing information, such as drawing number, issue, sheet and title, further details are below in the Indexing section.
Generally we find that scanning normal engineering monochrome drawings at 200dpi (dots per inch) is sufficient, this keeps filesizes at a good level and provides good definition and clarity. Sometime higher resolutions such as 400dpi can bring in unnecessary speckle, though sometimes small detail simply needs a high resolution to be captured. Once we understand the project that you have and the drawings involved we can suggest a resolution that would be suitable. The maximum optical resolution of the scanners is about 600dpi.
We appreciate that some drawings are very sensitive, because of this we offer off-site services at our premises and on-site scanning services at your premises. So we will bring drawing scanners, people, expertise and all the hardware to you. In highly secure scanning environments, upon completion of the project, we can remove all hard drives from our systems and hand them over to you, so no data needs to leave site.
We are registered with the Information Commissioners Office for Data Protection and GDPR Compliant (reg Z2002164) and have signed the Data Protection Promise, we also have confidentiality agreements already drawn up by our lawyers for both parties to sign. Disks containing the scans are encrypted to AES256 standards.
Scanning drawings on-site and off-site can be in accordance with BS10008.
Typically around 21,000 monochrome A0 drawing scans can be scanned and stored on a single DVD, which generally equates to about 35 hanging cabinets. With a 32GB USB Stick, that’s 126,000 scans.
Our scanner will also scan in Greyscale and Colour, so this will increase file sizes, but often needed for poor quality drawings, or drawings with colour content such as scanning a Map.
We can create hundreds of different file formats for scanned drawing images. However the most typical are PDF and TIFF for black and white/monochrome drawings. JPEG is often used for colour drawing scanning or map scanning, though JPEG is a lossy compression, for high quality colour large format scanning we can scan to an uncompressed TIFF format to retain as must quality of the original drawing, map or poster as possible. PDF is now a recognised standard, the following formats are becoming the norm for drawing scanning projects and drawing archiving projects:
PDF/A-1b Compact ISO19005-1 Level B
PDF/A-1b Raster ISO 19005-1 Level B
Once the scanning of drawings is complete, they usually need to be indexed. The exact drawing indexing requirements will depend mainly on your needs.
In its simplest form, we create an index that will become the filename, using key drawing information such as Drawing Number, Issue, Sheet and perhaps a Description. For example:
38489_2_A_Widget.pdf, where 38489 is the drawing number, 2 the sheet number, A the Issue/Revision, and Widget the brief title.
Some clients may already have a Document Management System or database that they wish to get the scanned drawings into or linked to. We can also provide scan data and index data in numerous formats, for example;
Comma Separated (.CSV), MS Excel, Ms Access, Text
Drawing or Large Format scans and index information can be returned on USB, DVD or sent via our Cloud Service.
Media containing the scanned drawings are encrypted to AES256 standards.
In instances when software is required to store and look after your scanning and indexing, we have a number of options. File Store is an entry level Document Retrieval System, designed for TIFF and PDF files. The system is based on a MS Access backend database. File Store enables users to search on a number of data fields and quickly display the scanned TIFF or PDF. The PDF or TIFF can then be emailed, printed, exported etc.