Cam IncollFieldwalker's export system produces professional permaculture design documents — with a title block, legend, north arrow, scale bar, and layer controls — in PDF, SVG, and PNG formats, ready to hand to a client, pin to the shed wall, or send to an earthworks contractor.
There's a moment in every design project where the work needs to leave the screen. The design you've been building — the swales, the zones, the garden beds, the paddock fences — needs to become a document. Something you can print. Something a contractor can read. Something a client can hold and feel confident about.
That moment is where a lot of permaculture design tools fall apart. You've done beautiful work on screen, and then the export is a flat screenshot with no legend, no scale reference, and no way to tell what's existing versus proposed. It looks like a marked-up satellite photo, not a professional design document.
This is something I cared about getting right.
What a professional design document needs
A permaculture design that's going to be used — actually used, in the field, by people making decisions about earthworks and planting and infrastructure — needs to communicate clearly without the designer standing next to it explaining things.
That means a title block identifying the project and the date. A legend explaining every symbol. A north arrow so you know which way you're looking. A scale bar so distances mean something. And clean, crisp line work that reproduces well whether it's viewed on a screen or printed on A3.
It also means control over what's included. Sometimes you want the full design with every layer. Sometimes you want just the earthworks for the contractor. Sometimes you want the base map with contours only, for a site analysis presentation. The export should let you choose.
What you see is what you get
Fieldwalker's export starts with a preview. You open it and see your map inside a page — A4 or A3, portrait or landscape. You pan and zoom the map within that page to frame exactly the view you want. The title block, legend, scale bar, and north arrow are all there, positioned on the page. You can adjust the stroke weight, switch between cream and white paper, toggle individual layers on or off.
What you see in that preview is exactly what downloads. No surprises. No misalignment between the preview and the file. The framing, the layer selection, the styling — it all carries through.
This sounds obvious, but it's surprisingly rare. Getting the preview to match the export precisely was one of the harder problems to solve, and it was worth solving because there's nothing more frustrating than carefully framing a view and then opening a file that doesn't match.
Three formats, three purposes
PDF is the professional deliverable. It's what you email to a client or print for a presentation. The line work is crisp at any zoom level, the aerial photo is embedded, and it looks like a proper design document.
PNG is the quick share. One click and you have a high-resolution image of exactly what's on your screen. Useful for progress updates, social media, or dropping into a report.
SVG is for designers who want to take the work further. It's a clean vector file — every symbol, every contour line, every label is a separate, editable element. You can open it in any vector editor and refine the design, adjust colours, or integrate it into a larger document.
From screen to shed wall
The point of all this is that the design document is the end product of the design process. It's the thing that gets used. A beautiful design that only exists on your laptop screen isn't serving anyone.
The map on the shed wall is the one that matters — the one you glance at before heading out to check on the new planting, the one the contractor references when grading the swale, the one you update next season when your understanding of the site deepens.
Fieldwalker is built to produce that document. Not as an afterthought, but as the natural conclusion of the design workflow. You observe, you analyse, you design — and then you export something worth printing.