Why remove the background?
Most PDF drawings include structural and architectural detail — walls, doors, hatching, room labels, and grid lines — that is not relevant to your takeoff. Removing the background strips this detail away, leaving only the services elements you need to measure. This makes it significantly easier to:
- See what you are taking off — coloured markers and lines stand out against a clean background.
- Verify auto-count results — counted symbols are more visible without surrounding clutter.
- Spot items you have missed — with the background removed, any uncounted symbols become obvious.
Background removal is especially helpful when using the auto-count symbol recognition tool, as it gives the software a cleaner image to work from and makes the counted symbols easier to verify visually.
Auto background removal
In most cases, the automatic tool is all you need. It detects the background content and removes it in a single step.
- 1
Click the Background Removal tool in the toolbar.
- 2
Click Auto Background. The software analyses the drawing and removes the background automatically.
The auto background function works well on the vast majority of PDF drawings, regardless of how they were originally created. It is the recommended method to try first.
Manual background removal methods
The Background Removal menu contains three additional methods below the Auto Background button. These are provided for drawings where the automatic detection does not produce the desired result — for example, heavily annotated drawings or PDFs with unusual colour profiles.
The three manual options give you progressively more control over what is removed. In practice, however, most users find the auto tool handles their drawings correctly and never need to use the manual methods.
Toggling the background layer
Once you remove the background (by any method), Ensign X creates it as a new layer in the Layers panel. This means background removal is never destructive — you can bring the background back at any time.
- 1
Click the Layers button in the toolbar to open the layers panel.
- 2
Find the Background layer in the list and tick its check box to show the background again.
- 3
Untick the check box to hide it once more.
Background removal does not alter the original PDF. It is a display setting that can always be reversed through the Layers panel.
When to remove the background
You can apply background removal at any point during your work — it does not have to be done at the start of a drawing. If you begin your takeoff and later decide the background is making it difficult to see what you are measuring, you can remove it without affecting any takeoff you have already completed.
Equally, you can remove the background at the very beginning and work without it for the entire session, toggling it back on briefly whenever you need to reference the architectural layout.
There is no penalty for removing the background early. Many users make it the first thing they do after setting the scale, so they work with a clean view from the outset.