Frequently Asked Questions
The short version of our philosophy: RoadDXF is a time saver, not a replacement for a drafter's judgment. A job that used to take hours of hand-drawing now lands in your editor in seconds, ready for you to trim, connect, and clean up as only you can.
We're always improving. If you find something frustrating, tell us -- it probably means the next version will be better.
About the exports
Are the DXF files perfect?
No, and we're honest about that. The exports are drawn from public map data (OpenStreetMap, county GIS services, and TIGER Census boundaries) and the quality of that data varies by region. A dense suburban area with active mappers will produce a near-perfect export. A rural area with sparse data will need more touch-up.
Even in the best case, you should expect to spend a few minutes trimming overhangs, connecting gaps at intersections, and cleaning up label placement. That's by design. Your expertise is what turns a rough starting draft into a finished drawing. We just get you to that starting point in seconds instead of hours.
What kind of cleanup should I expect?
- Trim road ends that extend beyond your box or past intersections
- Connect gaps where OSM data has small breaks between road segments
- Remove duplicates if the county parcel service returned overlapping geometry
- Reposition labels that landed on top of each other in dense areas
- Verify curves: roads with complex curves in the real world may be polyline approximations in OSM
How accurate is the geometry?
Accuracy depends on the data source. OpenStreetMap road centerlines are typically within a few feet of real-world position in populated areas, and further off in rural areas. Building footprints range from survey-grade (in cities with good aerial imagery contributions) to rough estimates elsewhere. County parcel boundaries, when available, reflect the assessor's official geometry and are usually the most accurate feature in an export.
RoadDXF is not a substitute for a survey. Do not use exports for legal descriptions, construction layout, or safety-critical work without verification.
Why is the parcel layer empty?
Parcel boundaries come from county assessor GIS services, and only some counties publish them publicly. The app tries to auto-detect a service for your area, then falls back to OpenStreetMap property-line data, then to TIGER Census block boundaries. If none of those have data for the area you drew, the parcel layer will be empty. Check the coverage map on the home page to see what tier your state or county has. We add new counties every week.
About parcel data, APNs, and property lines
What parcel data does RoadDXF pull, exactly?
For covered areas, RoadDXF queries the official county or state assessor GIS service and returns three things:
- Parcel polygons: the actual lot boundary lines, from assessor records
- APN (Assessor Parcel Number): the unique ID the county assigns to each parcel, also called a parcel number, folio number, or tax ID depending on the state
- Situs address: the physical location address of the parcel (see below)
All three land in named layers in the exported DXF. No signing up with county portals, no downloading shapefiles, no manual GIS steps.
What's a situs address, and why does it matter?
A situs address (also called a site address or physical address) is the address where the parcel is located, the one you'd GPS to. It is different from a mailing address, which may be a P.O. box or the property owner's home address somewhere else entirely.
RoadDXF only exports situs addresses because those are what's useful for field work, permit applications, and site identification. If a county's GIS data only exposes mailing addresses (or splits the address into separate number and street fields with no way to combine them), we exclude that service rather than give you bad data.
How do APNs and addresses appear in the DXF file?
Each parcel polygon is written to its own CAD layer. The APN and situs address are written as text entities placed inside the parcel boundary, auto-scaled to fit the lot. In AutoCAD, you'll see them as readable labels when you zoom in to a block or subdivision. If you only need the lot lines and not the labels, just freeze or delete the text layers. They are separate so you have full control.
What states and counties have real parcel coverage?
Coverage falls into three tiers:
- Statewide: every lot boundary, APN, and situs address in the state. Currently 34 states, including California, Florida, Texas, Ohio, Washington, Tennessee, Utah, Colorado, New York, Minnesota, and more.
- Major metro counties: individual county services for 268+ counties across another 15+ states, covering most large cities.
- Census blocks: rough block-level boundaries only, no individual lot lines or APNs, used as a last-resort fallback.
The interactive coverage map on the home page shows exactly what tier each state has. Hover or tap any state to see details.
Why do you pull from county GIS servers instead of a national parcel database?
County assessor GIS services are the authoritative source. They are the data that legal descriptions and tax records are based on. National aggregators exist, but they often lag behind, require expensive licensing, and still trace back to the same county source. Going direct means you get the most current geometry and the real APN, not a re-processed version of it. The tradeoff is that coverage depends on which counties publish open data, which is why it varies by state.
Is parcel data useful for make-ready engineering and utility design?
That's one of the primary use cases RoadDXF was built for. Make-ready engineers, fiber/telecom OSP designers, and utility planners need to know where property lines fall and who owns each parcel before placing poles, anchors, underground conduit, or joint use attachments. Having the APN, lot boundary, and road centerlines in the same DXF means you can:
- Identify parcel owners for easement requests and right-of-way negotiations
- Confirm pole and conduit placement relative to property lines
- Build permit submittal base maps without a separate GIS pull
- Hand off a clean starting drawing to the drafter instead of a blank canvas
What used to take hours of tracing, downloading county data, and aligning coordinate systems is one bounding box and one export.
Can I use parcel exports for site surveys or permit submittals?
As a base map and reference layer, yes. As a substitute for a legal survey, no. County assessor geometry is accurate enough for engineering design work and permitting research, but it should not be used for legal descriptions, construction stakeout, or any work that requires survey-grade precision. If your permit requires a licensed survey, RoadDXF gives you a head start, not the finished product.
For make-ready drafters and OSP engineers
How do I export a map to DXF for AutoCAD without hand-tracing?
Draw a bounding box on the RoadDXF map, pick your layers, and click Export. You get a DXF with road centerlines, road edges, building footprints, parcel lot lines, and APNs -- ready to open in AutoCAD in seconds. No hand-tracing, no shapefile downloads, no coordinate system alignment. A base map that used to take hours to set up comes out in under a minute.
You still do the drafting. RoadDXF just gets you to a real starting point instead of a blank canvas.
What makes RoadDXF different from Cadmapper?
The main difference is parcel data. RoadDXF pulls lot boundaries, APN (Assessor Parcel Number), and situs address from official county assessor GIS services and puts them in the DXF. Cadmapper produces road and building geometry but does not include parcel data or APNs.
For make-ready and OSP work where you need to know where property lines fall and who owns each parcel, that distinction matters. RoadDXF also draws directly from county GIS sources in 34 states statewide and 268+ metro counties, so the parcel geometry matches official assessor records rather than a third-party re-process.
How do I get parcel numbers (APNs) into AutoCAD for a make-ready job?
Draw a box around your project area. RoadDXF queries the county assessor GIS service, pulls every parcel polygon, APN, and situs address inside that box, and writes them as text entities placed inside the lot boundaries in the DXF. In AutoCAD they appear as readable labels when you zoom in. The APN layer and address layer are separate so you can freeze either one independently.
Parcel coverage is available for 34 states statewide and 268+ individual metro counties. The coverage map on the home page shows your area's tier.
Can I get a fiber or telecom route base map without a GIS license?
Yes. RoadDXF pulls from public ArcGIS services and OpenStreetMap -- no GIS seat, no license, no shapefile wrangling. Draw your route corridor, export, open in AutoCAD. For most OSP route design in covered areas you will have road centerlines, building footprints, and parcel data in one DXF without touching a GIS application at all.
What layers does a make-ready drafter get in the export?
Road centerlines, road edge lines, road name labels, building footprints, parcel lot boundaries, APN labels, situs address labels, waterways, and verges. Each is on its own named layer. Most make-ready drafters keep centerlines, edges, buildings, and parcels on and freeze the rest. You control which layers are included before you even click Export, so the DXF stays clean from the start.
Utility poles are not pulled from public data. If you have KMZ or KML files with pole locations, you can upload them and they will come through as their own layer in the DXF export.
Can I use RoadDXF for utility make-ready work (poles, anchors, joint use)?
Yes. Road centerlines, parcel lot lines, and building footprints in a single DXF give you a solid starting draft for a make-ready drawing. Parcel boundaries and APNs let you flag easements and identify parcel owners for right-of-way and joint-use attachment work without a separate GIS pull. The export is a starting draft -- your knowledge of the job and the field are still what make it a make-ready drawing.
Does RoadDXF replace a GIS department for OSP design?
For base map generation and parcel lookups, it handles a big chunk of what people used to need GIS software for. You still need engineering judgment for complex analysis. But if your need is "give me road lines and parcel boundaries for this two-mile route corridor in AutoCAD," RoadDXF covers that without a GIS seat, a data subscription, or a 45-minute download-and-reproject workflow.
Map to CAD and Google Earth to AutoCAD
How do I convert a map to CAD (AutoCAD DXF) without hand-tracing?
RoadDXF automates the whole map-to-CAD process. Draw a bounding box around your project area on the interactive map, select which layers you need, and click Export. You get a production-ready DXF in seconds with road centerlines, road edges, building footprints, parcel lot lines, and APN labels on properly named CAD layers. Open it directly in AutoCAD, BricsCAD, or DraftSight.
No hand-tracing. No shapefile downloads. No coordinate system alignment. A map-to-CAD conversion that used to take hours comes out in under a minute.
How do I get Google Earth into AutoCAD without tracing pixels?
The traditional workflow is to load a Google Earth screenshot as an underlay in AutoCAD and trace road lines and buildings by hand. RoadDXF skips all of that. Draw your area on the RoadDXF map (same satellite imagery underneath), click Export, and you get vector road lines, building footprints, and property boundaries already drawn as DXF entities -- no tracing, no underlay alignment.
For most make-ready and utility design jobs, this replaces the Google Earth trace entirely. You get cleaner geometry, proper layer names, and parcel data that no satellite trace can give you.
Can I use RoadDXF to build a permit submittal base map?
Yes, that is one of the primary use cases. Permit submittals for utility construction, ROW work, and fiber deployments typically require a base map showing road geometry, property lines, and APN or parcel identification. RoadDXF produces all of that in one export:
- Road centerlines and edge lines
- Parcel lot boundaries with APN labels
- Situs addresses inside each lot
- Building footprints
Draw a box around the permit area, export, open in AutoCAD, and add your design on top. The geometry comes from official county assessor GIS and OpenStreetMap, the same sources many permitting agencies use themselves. For most design and engineering permit packages, this is accurate enough to use as the base map layer.
What does a make-ready engineer typically use RoadDXF for?
Make-ready engineers use it to skip the part of the job that isn't engineering: tracing satellite imagery, downloading county parcel files, aligning projections, and building an AutoCAD base from scratch. With RoadDXF that starting drawing exists in under a minute.
Specific tasks it supports:
- Building permit base maps for fiber, telecom, and utility projects
- Pulling parcel lot lines and APNs for ROW, easement, and joint-use work
- Confirming pole, anchor, and conduit placement relative to property lines
- Generating a clean drafter-ready starting file instead of a blank canvas
- Route corridor analysis with road, building, and parcel geometry together
It covers 34 states statewide and 268+ individual metro counties.
About billing
How does the free trial work?
New accounts get 3 exports with no payment required. You can see the full product at full quality before deciding whether to subscribe. If 3 exports are enough to prove it to you, you probably won't need a subscription — and that's fine.
Can I change plans anytime?
Yes. Upgrades take effect immediately with prorated billing. Downgrades take effect at the end of your current billing period. You keep access to your current tier through the end of any period you've already paid for.
Do you offer refunds?
No — because of the free trial, all paid subscriptions are final. But you can cancel anytime to stop future charges, and you keep access through the period you already paid for. See our Refund Policy for details.
What happens if I hit my export limit?
Exports are blocked until the start of your next billing month, or until you upgrade to a higher tier. You'll see an upgrade prompt in the app when you hit the limit.
About your data
What do you store about me?
Your email address, your subscription tier and status, and a running count of exports used this month. That's it. We do not store your bounding boxes, your downloaded DXF files, or your credit card information. See our Privacy Policy for full details.
Who can see my exports?
Only you. Exports are generated in your browser and downloaded directly to your computer — they never pass through our servers.
About the product
Is RoadDXF still being developed?
Yes. This is an active project, and new features ship regularly. If there's a layer, format, or workflow you wish existed, let us know. User requests directly shape the roadmap.
Can I use RoadDXF exports in commercial work?
Yes, DXF files you generate are yours to use, including commercial drafting, client deliverables, and redistribution as part of a larger project. The underlying map data from OpenStreetMap is covered by the Open Database License (ODbL). For most drafting uses this is not a concern, but if you publish the map itself (as opposed to incorporating it into a larger design), you should credit OpenStreetMap.
Does RoadDXF work outside the United States?
Yes. Road, building, address, and waterway layers work worldwide wherever OpenStreetMap has coverage. Parcel boundary features are U.S.-only, because they depend on U.S. county GIS services and the TIGER Census.
What CAD software does the DXF work with?
AutoCAD (full and LT), BricsCAD, DraftSight, and any other DXF-compatible CAD application. We target the AC1015 / R2000 DXF format, which is broadly supported.
Can I customize which layers are exported?
Yes. The sidebar has toggles for each feature class: road edges, centerlines, road names, buildings, addresses, parcels, verges, waterways, mile markers, and more. Turn off what you don't need so your DXF stays clean. If you upload a KMZ or KML file with utility pole locations, those also get their own toggle.
Still have a question?
Email support@roaddxf.com. We aim to respond within two business days. If it's a bug, a screenshot and the approximate area you were exporting both help us diagnose it quickly.