Pinnacle Geodetics Sign in

Metes and bounds plotter: how to plot a deed from its legal description

A metes and bounds plotter turns the bearings and distances in a deed into a shape you can see. Title examiners use one to confirm a description matches the parcel they are insuring, surveyors use one to screen a record description before field work, and landowners use one to understand what they actually bought. This guide covers what a plotter has to get right, how to plot a description step by step, and how to tell whether the result can be trusted.

What a good deed plotter has to handle

• Every bearing format. Quadrant bearings with degrees-minutes-seconds (N 45°12'30" E), decimal degrees, and sloppy typography — missing degree signs, spaces, primes typed as apostrophes. Values like 60°57'60" should carry correctly instead of erroring.
• Old units. Feet, chains, links, rods, poles, perches, varas, and meters, converted exactly.
• Curves. The traverse leg of a curve is its chord bearing and chord length. A plotter that uses arc length draws the wrong polygon.
• Ties vs. calls. "From which the section corner bears N 2° W, 410 ft" is a reference tie, not part of the boundary. Commencement courses that lead to the POB are not boundary either.
• Closure. The plotter should report how far the last call misses the POB and the precision ratio, not quietly draw a closing line.
• A real map. A shape floating on graph paper can't tell you whether the parcel sits where the deed says it does.

Plotting a description by hand

1. Number every call from the POB, skipping commencement courses and ties.
2. Convert each quadrant bearing to an azimuth (NE = angle, SE = 180° − angle, SW = 180° + angle, NW = 360° − angle). Our bearing to azimuth converter does this for you.
3. Convert every distance to one unit.
4. For each call, compute the change in north (distance × cos azimuth) and east (distance × sin azimuth), and add it to the previous point.
5. Draw the points in order, then compare the last point to the POB to get the misclosure.

This works for a five-call lot. For a 30- or 40-call rural tract, one typo can take an hour to find — which is why most people use software.

How the Polygon Closure Auditor plots a description

1. Upload the deed. PDF, DOCX, JPG, PNG, or HEIC from your phone. Vision OCR reads the text, including scanned and older typed records.
2. Calls are extracted. Bearings, distances, and units are parsed into a table; monument ties, commencement courses, and exception tracts are separated from the boundary.
3. Review and edit. Correct any call directly in the table before running the traverse.
4. Geodetic traverse. Each course is computed on the WGS84 ellipsoid rather than flat-plane math, then drawn on satellite imagery.
5. Closure report. Misclosure in feet and meters, precision ratio, ellipsoidal area in acres, and perimeter. If it fails to close, the error detective points at the single call most likely to be wrong.
6. Export. Download the result as PDF, CSV, GeoJSON, or KML for Google Earth or GIS.

If the deed references a PLSS section corner, the auditor can pull the surveyed section from the BLM's national PLSS data and show it alongside the parcel.

Reading the result

A plotted parcel that closes tightly tells you the written description is internally consistent. It doesn't tell you where the line is on the ground — monuments and possession can control over the numbers. Use the plot to catch errors and ask better questions, and bring in a licensed surveyor for anything that affects the boundary itself.

Common questions