Plandroid is most powerful when you are creating a design on top of a house plan image. This image needs to be in one of the image formats that the program can read, such as a GIF, PNG, JPEG, or PDF. If your customer has emailed you an image in one of these formats, you can import it right away with the Browse button on the Import page. (You can also just drag and drop the image file into the image thumbnail box on the Import page.) However, if you only have a fax or other hard copy of the house plan, you will need to scan the image in to your computer before you can read it into Plandroid.
Remember that you can always draw a house plan from scratch with the Draw tools in the Design page, if you need to.
There is an example house plan image provided with the program installation (see the Quick Overview section for more details).
Note that, in general, it is better to have your house plan image in PNG, GIF, or PDF format. This is because these formats are not lossy, that is, the image data is compressed without discarding any of the image information. Images with sharp edges, such as a house plan, are best saved in these formats. Other popular formats, such as JPEG, can (depending on the image) have greater levels of compression - resulting in a smaller file size - but they do so by discarding information from the image. This can result in sharp edges becoming blurred and reducing the quality of your resulting design image.
Plandroid fully supports PDF image files. Note, however, that a PDF may contain image data in a raster format (where the image is stored in bits for each picture element (pixel), such as a bitmap), or in vector format (where the image is stored as lines), or a mixture of both. A raster image will become blurred if you zoom into it, while a vector image will remain crisp. The highest quality print images will be produced if you can obtain your house plan in vector format. Scanners will generally embed a raster image into the PDF files they produce.
If you wish to import a design from some other package, such as a CAD program which does not allow you to save to PDF, then you can always do a screen grab. This is a slightly more complex process whereby you capture the image on your screen and save the image in one of the above formats that can be read by Plandroid. This is usually done with the aid of another software package. One way would be to use a dedicated screen grab program, such as the free software Screen Grab Pro. Another way would be to just press Print Scrn (to capture the whole screen), and paste it into an image program such as the excellent (and free) IrfanView. You can then save the image (using the IrfanView menu item File -> Save As, and choosing, for example, the .PNG format), and then import that file into Plandroid.
You will need to clean up your image in a separate program before importing it into Plandroid if you want to remove unwanted image artefacts or dimensions, for example. Many programs exist which can help you in this task, such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Paint Shop Pro, or the free GIMP, to name just a few.
If you first lay out your design and only afterwards decide to edit or clean up your plan image, that is no problem - you do not have to redo your design if you change your image size or layout. See How do I use an edited plan image? for details.
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