PL Viewer: open legacy PL1/PL2 survey drawings and convert to DXF

July 15, 2026

PL Viewer opens legacy PL1/PL2 survey drawings, the paired binary files from DOS-era coordinate geometry systems of the 80s and 90s, directly in your browser and converts them to clean AutoCAD DXF.

What it does

Drop a PL1/PL2 pair and pan, zoom and rotate the drawing with its original layers, pen colors and line types. Toggle layers on and off with per-layer entity counts. Export an R12-compatible DXF, verified by a built-in syntax checker before download, or use batch mode to convert a whole folder into a single ZIP with a progress bar and per-file report.

CRD files

If you have archives that fail to convert, or a coordinate database (CRD) that accompanied your PL files, I'd love to hear about it. A few record types still reference point tables that are missing from every archive I have seen.

Try it: chernitsky.net/pl-viewer

How to citeShow

Author ORCID: 0009-0000-1316-1362

APA
Chernitsky, I. (2026). PL Viewer: open legacy PL1/PL2 survey drawings and convert to DXF [Computer software]. Chernitsky.net. https://chernitsky.net/blog/pl-viewer
IEEE
I. Chernitsky, "PL Viewer: open legacy PL1/PL2 survey drawings and convert to DXF," Chernitsky.net, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://chernitsky.net/blog/pl-viewer
BibTeX
@misc{chernitsky2026pl,
  author       = {Chernitsky, Ilia},
  title        = {PL Viewer: open legacy PL1/PL2 survey drawings and convert to DXF},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://chernitsky.net/blog/pl-viewer}},
}