Everything Naapi Plotter can do
It started as a box you typed a number into. It is now a proper measuring tool: load your naksa, set the scale, trace the boundary, measure any two points, keep several plots in one project and export the lot. Here is the full tour.
Most Nepali land calculators on the internet are the same thing wearing different colours: one input box, one dropdown, one answer. Type 5 Ropani, get 27,380 square feet. Useful for about four seconds.
That is where this started too. The problem is that almost nobody actually knows their area to begin with — that is the thing they are trying to find out. What they have is a naksa on the table, a tape measure in the bag, or a photo on their phone. Converting a number you do not have yet is not much help.
So GharNaksa Naapi Plotter grew into the other half of the job: getting the number in the first place. This post is the guided tour of what is in there now. If the drawing you have is a Mero Kitta map print, start with the naksha tutorial and come back here for the rest of the tool.
Start with a picture of your naksa
Load the drawing however is easiest. Pick a file, take a photo with the camera, drag an image onto the window, or just paste one from the clipboard. Everything opens in the browser — there is no account, no sign-in and no upload-and-wait step before you can start working.
iPhone photos are HEIC by default, and most tools quietly reject them. This one opens them directly: natively where the browser can decode HEIC, and through a decoder that loads on demand everywhere else. JPG, PNG, WEBP, AVIF, GIF, BMP and TIFF all work too, and a photo taken sideways is turned the right way up from its EXIF orientation.
Two taps to set the scale
A photo has pixels; land has feet. Calibration is the bridge, and it is two taps: tap the ends of any line whose real length you know, then type that length in millimetres, centimetres, metres, inches or feet.
The part that matters — and the part other tools skip — is what kind of length you just typed:
- On the ground — a real distance on the land. A dimension printed along a boundary, a 20 ft road width, a wall you measured with a tape.
- On the paper — a ruler reading across the printed sheet. That gets multiplied by the drawing scale to reach the ground distance.
Mixing those two up is the classic way to get an area near zero, so the tool asks rather than guessing. And if the calibration you enter would make the drawing implausibly tiny or absurdly huge, it says so up front instead of letting you trace a whole boundary and hand you 0.00 at the end.
Ref A and Ref B stay draggable after you place them. A calibration end that landed slightly off gets nudged with a finger — you do not have to retake the whole reference.
For flat scans, skip the tape entirely
If you have a proper scan rather than a phone photo, pick a drawing-scale preset — 1:500 at 300 DPI, and so on — and the scale comes straight from the paper. Large uploads get downscaled for speed, and the effective DPI is corrected for that automatically, so the preset stays honest.
Save a calibration and reuse it
Measuring a stack of sheets from the same survey office at the same scale? Save the calibration as a template and apply it to the next image. If the new image is a different width, the template rescales itself proportionally.
Trace the boundary, watch the area move
Tap each corner in order around the plot. A tap lands a corner exactly where you tapped — not snapped to some grid you did not ask for. Tap an edge to insert a corner between two existing ones, drag a corner to move it, pinch or scroll to zoom in as far as you need.
While you work, the area updates live, each edge is labelled with its length, and a scale bar sits in the corner of the canvas so you can eyeball whether the calibration is sane before you trust the number.
Phones get the attention they deserve
On a touchscreen your finger covers the exact spot you are aiming at. Hold and slide, and a magnifier opens showing the precise point under the crosshair; the placement commits when you lift. The crosshair tracks your finger one-to-one rather than floating at a fixed offset, because an offset makes a plain tap land somewhere you did not tap. Grab a corner and it keeps the offset it had when you grabbed it, so nothing jumps.
Since one finger cannot both draw and pan, panning is two fingers — or flip on the hand tool on the canvas and pan with one.
Undo covers what you actually did
Ctrl/Cmd + Z and Shift + Z undo and redo, and on a phone there is a pair of arrows on the canvas itself. The timeline covers everything you placed by tapping or dragging: corners, plots, dimensions and both calibration markers. Typed values like the reference length stay out of it, because undoing a keystroke inside a text box surprises people.
The measure tool: any two points, any time
Sometimes the question is not "how big is this plot" but "how far is it from the corner of the house to the road". The measure tool is a CAD-style dimension: tap two points and you get extension lines, arrowheads and the length, rotated to sit along the line and never printed upside down.
- Object snap pulls the ends onto plot corners, calibration markers and other dimension ends, so a corner-to-corner reading is repeatable instead of eyeballed. Turn it off if you want free placement.
- Drag either end to correct it, or drag the middle of the line to push the label clear of the drawing underneath.
- Every dimension is listed with its length and its bearing in degrees, and both go into the exports.
- Dimensions are annotations. Placing one can never add a boundary corner or shift a calibration marker, so measuring something never quietly changes your area.
Several plots, one drawing
Real sheets have more than one parcel on them. Trace as many plots as you like against a single calibration, give each one a name and a colour, and hide or show any of them with its eye toggle while you work. Alongside each individual area you get the combined total across everything you have drawn — handy for a parcel split across kittas, or for adding up what a family actually owns.
Projects that are still there tomorrow
Work is saved as a project in your browser, and you can reload, rename or delete it. The plot geometry goes to localStorage and the naksa image itself is stored in IndexedDB under the same project id — which means reopening a project brings back the drawing, not just the outline floating in space.
Getting it out: PNG and PDF
When you are done, export a labelled PNG rendered at the full resolution of the original image — plots, edge lengths, dimensions and bearings included. Or open the print view and use your browser’s own Save as PDF for a detailed boundary sheet you can email to an engineer, a buyer or the bank.
No naksa? Measure it with a tape
The image is optional. In By lengths mode you sketch the plot roughly — the sketch needs no scale at all — press Auto-connect & triangulate to build the boundary, base corner and diagonals in one go, then type in each measured length in whatever unit you measured it.
Side lengths alone are not enough for anything with four or more sides: a quadrilateral with fixed sides still flexes like a hinge, so its area is not determined. That is why the diagonals matter, and why the tool builds them for you. Each triangle is solved with Heron’s formula and the areas added up.
And then it fixes your sketch
Here is the nicest bit. Your dragged corners landed wherever your finger left them, so the sketch has the right corners in the wrong places. But the lengths you entered already determine the true shape completely — so the tool reconstructs that real polygon from your measurements and lays it over your sketch, moving the corners as little as possible.
It keeps the size and orientation you arranged, tries both handednesses so your plot is never mirrored, and corrects only what was genuinely wrong. Calculate does it automatically; Fit shape to lengths does it on demand. Either way it is a single undo step, and the area never changes — that came from the lengths all along, not from the drawing.
If your measurements cannot form a real triangle, you are told which three are at fault rather than being shown a nonsense shape.
Every unit, at the same time
No unit dropdown to fiddle with — the answer arrives in all of them at once.
| System | Units | Base |
|---|---|---|
| Hill | Ropani, Aana, Paisa, Dam | 1 Ropani = 5,476 sq ft |
| Terai | Bigha, Katha, Dhur | 1 Bigha = 72,900 sq ft |
| Metric / Imperial | sq m, sq ft, sq in, gaj, hectare, acre | 1 sq m = 10.7639 sq ft |
Both traditional systems are written as chains — 2-3-1-2 Ropani-Aana-Paisa-Dam, 1-5-10 Bigha-Katha-Dhur — and a value that does not land on a whole Dam or Dhur shows its remainder rather than rounding it away behind your back.
Fourteen free converters, no JavaScript required
Not every visit needs the full tool. The converter pages handle the quick questions — Ropani to square feet, Bigha to Katha, hectare to Bigha, square metre to Ropani and the rest — and every one of them carries the Ropani/Bigha chain calculator: three rows, the hill chain, the Terai chain and a plain area, where typing in any row rewrites the other two.
Each page also ships a static reference table that works with JavaScript switched off entirely. That is the part people screenshot and send on WhatsApp, so it had better not depend on a script loading.
How accurate is any of this?
Planning-grade, and honestly so. With a flat scan, a long calibration reference and careful tapping you can land within a few percent — plenty for comparing listings, planning a house, estimating construction cost or sanity-checking a quoted area.
It is not a legal survey. A tilted photo stretches one side of the sheet in a way no single scale factor can undo, and no amount of clever maths in a browser replaces the Survey Department record. For registration, transfer or anything a lawyer will read, use a licensed surveyor. For everything that happens before that point, this is faster, free, and in your pocket.
Where to start
Open the tool and load a photo of your naksa.
Tap the two ends of one line you know the real length of, and enter it.
Tap around the boundary.
Read the area in Ropani, Bigha, square feet and square metres at once.
That is the whole thing, four steps and a couple of minutes. Everything else in this post — templates, dimensions, multiple plots, projects, exports, field lengths — is there for when you need it, and out of the way when you do not.
