Drawing a Floor Plan

Drawing a Floor Plan

Assume you want to draw a floor plan for your apartment. You got a printout of a floor plan from the landlord, showing the walls, door and windows, and a few (but maybe not all) measures, similar to this:

If you did not get an electronic copy of the floor plan, the first step is to scan it. You will thus have a bitmap, and we will trace it into a vector image, but without using the automatic Trace feature of Inkscape.

• Open up Inkscape, and create a new layer, let's call it "Background".
• Import the bitmap floor plan into it, and rotate it so that most of the walls are horizontal and/or vertical. Lock the layer.

• Adjust scale of the image: draw an object (e.g. a rectangle) of which you know the real dimensions of. In our example, we use the 3×2 meter balcony, so a rectangle of 300×200 is good. Then scale the rest of the image to match it. Doing this only visually is just fine, that scan is not exact anyway.

• (adjust document size)

• Draw walls in a new layer "Walls". Easiest is probably to use simple lines with a specified width and a nice color. Using "Paste style" comes handy.
  • Turn down opacity to about 60% to be able to see features on the Background bitmap.

• Optionally draw doors and windows, possibly in a new layer.

• Draw your furniture in a new layer "Furniture". You can use just rectangles, where you type in the measures in the toolbar, with the same scale factor you used for the balcony.

• (print to scale?)

See also

• http://www.opendimension.org/ida5D/inkscape.php