Editorial standards
How We Build & Review Our Content
PDFDepth publishes technical content about PDFs, measurement, takeoff, plan review, and document workflows. This page explains — plainly — where our information comes from, who checks it, how often it is maintained, and where its limits are. It exists so you can decide how much to trust us.
What technical standards we consult
Engineering and construction articles are written against primary sources, not other blogs. Depending on the topic we consult: the FDOT Standard Plans Instructions (the agency's own published criteria for plan-sheet review), the International Building Code (IBC 2021) and ICC code commentary, ISO 32000-2 for PDF document-structure behavior, the buildingSMART IFC specifications for BIM data, Autodesk DXF documentation for CAD interchange, NIST FIPS publications for digital-signature and hashing behavior, and vendor developer documentation for integrations (for example, the Procore developer API).
Where a post makes a claim about measurement, units, code requirements, file formats, or interoperability, the claim is checked against the governing document — and the source is linked in the article's References section so you can verify it yourself.
How product claims are validated
Every workflow described on this site is verified against the live PDFDepth application before publication. Feature descriptions, menu paths, field counts, template counts, export formats, and pricing are checked against the actual product — not marketing copy. When a feature has a limit, the limit is stated in the article: signature workflows that are not DocuSign-style envelopes, IFC viewers that are not yet implemented, download restrictions that discourage but cannot prevent copying.
If the product changes, the article is updated and the "Updated" date on the page reflects the real revision — we do not bump dates to look fresh.
What gets professionally reviewed
Articles in the Construction & Engineering category — measurement, takeoff, plan review, code compliance, CAD workflows, section properties — are reviewed for technical accuracy by licensed professional engineers before publication. Design and general PDF articles are reviewed for factual accuracy by the product team.
Our technical methodology and engineering-related functionality are developed with input and review from qualified engineering professionals and professional architects.
How often content is updated
Articles are re-verified when the underlying product feature changes, when a cited standard is revised (for example, a new FDOT fiscal-year index set or an ICC code cycle), or when a reader reports an error. The date shown on each article is the date of the last substantive change.
What our limitations are
We write about the workflows our product supports, so this site is not a substitute for a licensed professional's judgment on a specific project. Calculations produced by software — takeoffs, section properties, plan-review findings — are decision-support output that a qualified professional should verify before relying on them for construction, permitting, or cost commitments.
Where we compare our product to other software, we describe the other tool generically and focus on what our own product verifiably does. We do not claim to have audited competitors' current pricing or feature sets.
We are a product company, and these articles exist partly to explain what the product does. We try to make every article genuinely useful on its own terms — if a page reads as marketing without substance, tell us and we will fix it.
Primary sources we link to
Found an error? Tell us — technical corrections are fixed and the article date updated. You can also try every workflow yourself in the live workspace, or read more about the team on About.