Tablet survey at scale: AutoCAD-grade drawings without AutoCAD on every tablet

We delivered a tablet-first replacement built around three pieces.

The tablet app. A single-page Angular application on the surveyor's tablet, designed for offline-first field work. The surveyor opens the assigned survey, sees the AutoCAD drawing rendered in SVG.js (no AutoCAD licence required on the tablet), measures and annotates directly over the drawing, captures photos that pin to specific points on the drawing, and records condition assessments against a structured form.

The drawing engine. AutoCAD DXF files are parsed server-side and rendered to SVG for tablet display. The surveyor's annotations, measurements, and photo pins overlay on the SVG without modifying the original DXF. Round-trip back to a reportable AutoCAD file happens server-side at submission.

The merge portal. A web portal where the office team sees every tablet's submissions consolidated to a master record. Tablets sync when they reach signal; the portal handles the conflict cases where two surveyors are editing adjacent sections of the same drawing, and produces the final deliverable per survey.

• A fleet of tablets in production across the firm's survey teams, used daily for live engineering surveys.
• Survey-to-deliverable cycle compressed from a multi-day, multi-handoff process to a same-survey-day workflow.
• AutoCAD licence costs removed from the field-engineering tooling budget, since the tablet does drawing-grade work without a CAD licence on the device.
• Transcription errors substantially reduced, since data is captured once at source rather than re-typed at each handoff.
• The application has been running daily through a corporate acquisition of the business unit, with the engagement continuing under the new ownership without interruption.

Offline-first is not optional for field tools. Tower sites are not where mobile signal lives. The architecture has to assume the tablet is offline for the whole survey and only syncs when it is back in coverage.

Browser-rendered CAD beats per-seat AutoCAD licences for most field work. Full AutoCAD on every tablet is expensive and unnecessary. Browser-rendered SVG covers what a surveyor actually does on site and runs on cheap tablets the team can afford to replace.

Master-merge architecture handles the awkward cases. Two surveyors annotating different parts of the same drawing is not a conflict; it is a merge. Designing for that pattern from day one is easier than bolting it on later.