Deed Reader Pro - Plot Deeds in Seconds

Looks interesting. How does the software handle general directions, such as "southwesterly"?

@peter-lothia if there is a general direction you would just need to edit the Deed Text to be a bearing for example you southwesterly could be changed to S 45d W. 

I'm curious at how it handles faint text, and hard to read text. Does it "flag" questionable text? (Text that could mean several things) Maybe with some color? A particular surveyor around here used a font, that with 2 or 3 copies, 6's and 8's look alike. I have to enter the whole deed, and see what closes, to be sure.

I will definitely be reviewing this. Its very high on my list of important things. Thanks. 

Nate

Nate, I use Tesseract OCR (optical character recognition) Engine to translate pdfs and images of deeds to text. It is an open source program that is sponsored by Google. If the text is not clear then it may not be read correctly. When this happens you may need to manually correct some of the text and then the program can process it again to extract the bearings, distances and monument descriptions . I do some post processing of the text that is spit out from the OCR and to try correct for common errors that I encountered when testing it. I have used about 150 deeds for testing this current version.

Text is not flagged but I color code each call a different color to make it easy to compare the text to the call table. 

How does your software handle older deeds written in cursive?

Looks good Matt.  Can you add recognition of colon.  For instance "thence the following courses:" 

Watching video looks like only comma or semicolon recognized there.  Deeds around here have the full colon: then a semicolon separating the following bearing and distance calls.

Grant, unfortunately reading handwritten deeds in cursive is not supported.

Duane it will recognize already series of of calls in "thence the following courses:" format.  The ExampleDeed1 included with it is in fact in this format.

The colon is not required, and it will work with or without the colon.  The requirement is the keyword "courses" or "lines" and then a comma or semicolon after each call.

hasn't this been around for quite a while?   

Andy, Carlson Survey has a very basic deed reader.  You must paste the text of a deed into it and then it generates a call table.  It does not accept a pdf or image of a deed like Deed Reader Pro does.  It also has very strict format rules for the format of calls.  My goal with Deed Reader Pro was to create a program that only requires the user to select a pdf or image of a deed and then it will be able to extract the call and support a wide variety of formats for the deed text.  There are several other programs similar to Carlson's deed reader too but nothing that does what I am doing.

I also support monuments being passed and extract the monument descriptions.  I have not seen anyone else that does this.

I just updated the download link, now version 1.1 is available. I had a request for support for bearings in hyphen format e.g "N 12-45-16 E".  It now will support this.

What is the price after the trial?

I have set the price at $40 a month if you pay for a whole year or $50 month to month.  I would expect and hope that it will save you many hours of work each month and I'm sure your bill rate is much more than $40 a hour so I think it is a good deal and I feel the pricing is inline with other software programs.

Plotting instruments "manually" has much greater significance to the overall objective than just getting things into cad.

This "plotting" procedure creates an intimate relationship and understanding between a surveyor, an instrument, and a particular situation/field conditions.

It will actually slow down/disrupt the reading and comprehension of the description and it's impact on the situation.

Even if/when there are 50 instruments affecting title, knowing they are correct is more important than speed.

$480 - $600 a year sounds like a lot of $ (for a new product with similar equivalents on the market) that still requires me to stop, go back, check its results, and make changes manually.

I am not saying that you shouldn't read the deed.  In fact I think this program makes it much easier for you to read the deed because I color code all the calls.  I find old deeds that are all one paragraph difficult to read with holding a sheet of paper up against the computer screen and reading it line by line so I don't loose my place.  When the calls are color coded it is much easier to read.  

Compare trying to read the pdf to the color coded text in the following example.

I also just looked into being able to highlight and color code the calls in the original pdf before it is converted to text.  This is something I think I should be able to do and will work on.  

My goal with this program was to prevent each bearing and distance call from having to be manually typed into a call table, not to prevent you from having to read the dead.  

I will think more about pricing and would be interested to hear what people think is fair and willing to pay for this after they have tried it.

You definitely need some type of feedback on the OCR processing status. I am trying to put in PDFs and I presume it is processing but have no feedback of whether it's working or how long it might take.

I like the color coding concept.  I am forever highlighting different things with a pile of multicolored highlighters to track things more easily.

@tfdoubleyou I will look into to this more and try to find a solution. If it doesn’t return an error message it is busy processing the file. The length of time it takes is dependent upon the length of the pdf and the speed of your CPU.

I've continued to test this and have become impressed with the results. I had a couple of issues at the start, but support was fast and thorough. Now with many of the kinks worked out, I'm finding quite a bit of utility.

It's not a click-and-done operation, the output still takes a bit of work in CAD to get to my deed plot standards, but this tool gets me 90% of the way there in just a few minutes.

I just release Version 1.2 and have implemented some of the suggestions I've received so far:

- Moved Line and Description Layer input option to the main window
- Added the option to plot the area and closure in CAD
- Added progress status of OCR and deed processing
- Improved post processing of OCR text
- Bug fixes

I also have decided to make this program free for the time being while I am still receiving feedback about it.

https://www.deedreaderpro.com/download

Note: The manual and videos haven't been updated yet to reflect the changes made in this release.