What comes out

A drawing in Bonsai is not a file that sits next to your model. It is an object inside it.

Specifically, it is an annotation entity with a scale, a position, a direction to look in, and a note of which kind of view it is - a plan, a reflected plan, a section, an elevation. Add a drawing to your project and your .ifc file has grown by one object. Send the file to somebody and you have sent them the drawings.

A view is a camera and a question

What a drawing contains is not decided by what happens to be in shot. It is decided by a query - the same query language as Finding things, stored on the drawing, saying which elements are included and which are kept out.

That is why this guide put querying first. A drawing of the second floor is not a picture that somebody framed carefully; it is a saved question, and the day the model changes it asks the question again.

The geometry it draws with is already in the model too. A window’s appearance in plan is a stored representation rather than a projection worked out on the fly, which is the subject of Representations.

Annotation is data, not draughting

Everything you add on top is also IFC. Dimensions, text, leaders, level markers, break lines, revision clouds, hatched fill, symbols - each of these is an annotation object in the file, with a type saying what kind of annotation it is.

This has a consequence people find hard to believe the first time. There is no separate drawing file to keep in step, and no export of your annotation into somebody else’s format for them to see it. A consultant who opens your IFC gets your dimensions and your notes along with your walls, because they were never anywhere else.

Annotation text can also read the model rather than repeat it. A tag can be told to print a property of the element it points at, so a door tag showing a fire rating is showing the door’s actual fire rating, not a number somebody typed next to a door and forgot to update. That is the difference between labelling a model and describing one.

The SVG is the result, not the drawing

When you want to look at a drawing or send a PDF, Bonsai renders it to .svg. It is worth being clear that this file is an output. The drawing lives in the model; the .svg is what the drawing looked like when you last generated it.

A rendered drawing converts to .dxf as well, for the consultant who needs lines in a CAD file rather than a picture. That is an output too, and the same rule holds: it is what the drawing looked like the day you made it, and the drawing itself is still in the model.

The discipline running through this whole guide applies here too: the description is the durable thing, the result is regenerable, and when the model changes you regenerate. What it buys you is that the description survives - your drawings are not a set of files that gradually stop matching the building.

The appearance is yours to control, and by ordinary means rather than through a preferences dialog. The line weights, hatches, symbols and titleblocks are .svg and .css files, as noted in Who makes Bonsai.

Sheets

Drawings get placed on sheets, and a sheet is another object in the file - a document, with an identification and a title, holding the drawings you put on it along with a titleblock.

So the whole set is in the model: the views, what each one contains, the annotation on them, the sheets they sit on, and the numbering. What comes out at the end is a stack of paper or PDFs, and what is kept is the thing that produced them.

Schedules and quantities

Schedules work the same way and are stored the same way - a document object in the file, with a query deciding its rows and the same value-reading syntax deciding its columns.

A door schedule is therefore not a table somebody typed. It is a question about doors, and the answer is regenerated from the model. The numbers in it come from the quantities already written into the file, which is why Properties and materials makes a point of quantities being stored: a schedule is not doing arithmetic on geometry as you watch, it is reporting what the model says.

Schedules come out as spreadsheets, and the same machinery reads them back in, which turns out to be one of the more useful things here - a schedule can be edited in a spreadsheet by somebody who has never opened Bonsai, and the changes brought back into the model.

And the rest of it

The same graph carries further outputs that this guide is not going to cover in any depth. Tasks and work schedules are IFC objects, so a programme can be attached to the model and the model animated against it. Cost items and cost schedules are IFC objects too, so quantities can be priced without leaving the file.

Those are large subjects with their own tools, and you do not need them to produce drawings. The point of mentioning them is structural rather than practical: they are not separate applications bolted on. They are more objects in the same bag, reached by the same queries, kept in the same file.

Which is the whole of it. Everything the project produces is in the document you are editing, and the document is one file.

Last updated 3 September 2026.