An Introduction to SmartDraw Floor Plan Notation

SmartDraw Floor Plan Notation (FPN) is a simple, text-based way to describe a room or a whole building by its measurements. You write a few lines that say how long each wall is and where the doors go, and SmartDraw turns that text into a complete, editable floor plan.

This tutorial walks you through the notation from the ground up. We start with a single rectangular room, add doors and windows, handle rooms that are not simple rectangles, and finish by connecting several rooms into a full plan. Each step includes notation you can paste straight into SmartDraw.

The Idea

Imagine standing inside a room, facing one wall. You measure that wall and write it down. Then you turn to face the next wall and measure that one. You keep going, turn by turn, until you arrive back where you started.

That is the whole idea behind SmartDraw Floor Plan Notation. Each line describes one wall, in the order you would walk them, and each turn is either a right turn (clockwise) or a left turn (counter-clockwise). If you can walk a room and call out measurements, you can write it in Floor Plan Notation.

Remember these two rules:

  • Every wall gets its own line, and every line begins with "Right" or "Left", which is the direction you turned to face that wall.
  • Walk the room in one continuous direction to close your outline.
Recreating an existing layout with SmartDraw AI

Your First Room

Here is a rectangular room that is 12 feet wide and 14 feet deep:

outline
Right Wall 12'
Right Wall 14'
Right Wall 12'
Right Wall 14'

Read it as a walk. You face the first wall and measure 12 feet. You turn right and measure the next wall, 14 feet. Turn right again for the far wall, 12 feet. Turn right one last time for the final wall, 14 feet, and you are back at the start. Four walls, four lines, one closed room.

A few things to notice:

  • The word "Wall" names the feature, and 12' is its length. A space separates them.
  • "Right" at the start of each line means you made a clockwise quarter turn from the previous wall. Because every turn here is a right turn, the room is a simple rectangle.
  • You did not have to tell SmartDraw where the room sits on the page or how thick the walls are. Sensible defaults handle that, and you can override them later.
Simple room generated with Floor Plan Notation

A Note on Units

Lengths are written in real-world units, and FPN understands several formats.

Mix feet and inches freely, but keep a single room in one system. Do not switch from imperial to metric partway through the same outline.

What You Want How You Write It
Feet 12'
Feet and inches 12' 6"
Feet, inches, and fractions 4' 9 5/8"
Meters 3.5m
Millimeters 1200mm

Adding Doors, Windows, and Gaps

A wall is rarely just a wall. FPN lets you describe what is along a wall by listing features left to right as you face it, each with its own length.

Take the fourth wall of our room and put a 3-foot door in it. Instead of one 14-foot wall, we describe the wall as a run of pieces that add up to 14 feet:

outline
Right Wall 12'
Right Wall 14'
Right Wall 12'
Right Wall 2' Door 3' Wall 9'

That last line reads: 2 feet of wall, then 3-foot door, then 9 feet of wall. The pieces sum to 14 feet, the true length of the wall. The door sits 2 feet in from the corner.

SmartDraw AI adding door to room

Windows work the same way. Here we add an 8-foot window to the second wall, centered by putting 3 feet of wall on each side:

outline
Right Wall 12'
Right Wall 3' Window 8' Wall 3'
Right Wall 12'
Right Wall 2' Door 3' Wall 9'
SmartDraw AI adding window to room

The four feature words you will use most are: "Wall", "Door", "Window", and "Gap".

The pattern is always the same: a feature word followed by a length, repeated along the wall, with the lengths adding up to the full wall. This is the single most useful idea in the notation, so it is worth getting comfortable with it before moving on.

Word What It Is
Wall A plain, solid wall segment.
Door A door. Variants include "PocketDoor" and "DoubleDoor".
Window A window.
Gap An open span with no wall, no door, and no window (for example, a doorway with no door, or an opening between two spaces).

Rooms That Are Not Rectangles

Real rooms have nooks, wings, and the occasional angled wall. The notation handles all of them with the same walk-and-measure approach. The trick is knowing when to turn left instead of right.

So far every turn has been a right, because the inside corners of a rectangle all turn the same way as you walk clockwise. When a room turns the other way, you use "Left". In practice, use "Right" for the outside corners of a clockwise walk, "Left" when the wall juts inward or the shape doubles back.

Alcoves and Bump-Outs

Suppose the top wall of a room has a small nook that juts outward, like a reading alcove or a bay. You walk along the wall, step out into the nook, come back, and continue. The step out and back are where "Left" turns appear.

Here is a room whose top wall runs 16 feet but has a 4-foot-wide nook that projects 3 feet outward, starting 5 feet from the corner:

outline
Right Wall 5'
Left Wall 3'
Right Wall 4'
Right Wall 3'
Left Wall 7'
Right Wall 12'
Right Wall 16'
Right Wall 12'

Walk it slowly. You go 5 feet along the top, then turn "Left" to step out 3 feet into the nook, go "Right" across its 4-foot face, "Right" back in 3 feet, then "Left" to continue the last 7 feet of the top wall (5 + 4 + 7 = 16 feet of top wall in total). The remaining three "Right" lines are the ordinary right, bottom, and left walls of the room. The two "Left" turns are what carve out the alcove.

Room with alcove generated with Floor Plan Notation

L-Shaped Rooms

An L-shaped room is a rectangle with a bite taken out of one corner. That bite introduces exactly one inside corner, which is one "Left" turn.

This is an L that fits inside a 20-by-20 area, with a 10-by-10 square removed from the bottom-right:

outline
Right Wall 20'
Right Wall 10'
Right Wall 10'
Left Wall 10'
Right Wall 10'
Right Wall 20'

The walk goes 20 feet across the top, 10 feet down the right side, 10 feet back to the left (the top edge of the notch), then a "Left" turn to go 10 feet further down into the notch, 10 feet across the bottom, and 20 feet back up the left side to close. That lone "Left" is the inside corner of the L.

L-shaped room generated using Floor Plan Notation

Diagonal and Angled Walls

By default, each new wall turns 90 degrees from the one before it. When a wall meets its neighbor at some other angle, add Angle <degrees> at the start of the section, right after "Right" or "Left". The angle is measured from the end of the previous wall.

This room has two angled walls that clip a corner into a slant:

outline
Right Wall 12'
Right Angle 120 Wall 7' Window 8' Wall 4' 9.625"
Right Angle 60 Wall 21' 10.8125"
Right Wall 2' Door 3' Wall 12' 1.79"

The second line turns and then runs at 120 degrees instead of the usual 90, and it still carries a window like any other wall. The third line comes back at 60 degrees. Everything else you have learned, features and lengths, works exactly the same on an angled wall. Use "Angle" whenever a wall is not square to its neighbor, and reach for precise measurements (like 4' 9 5/8") when the geometry demands them.

Room with angled wall generated from floor plan notation

Controlling the Outline

Every room you have written so far opened with a bare "outline" line, which uses the defaults for where the room lands on the page, which corner it starts from, and how thick the walls are. You can set any of these by adding parameters to that same "outline" line. Here is a 12-by-10 room with all four set explicitly.

outline originx 10' originy 10' corner topleft thickness 4"

All parameters are optional. "outline" on a line by itself is perfectly valid, and every value below has a sensible default.

Parameter What It Controls Default
originx The X position of the starting corner on the canvas. 10'
originy The Y position of the starting corner. 10'
corner Which corner the origin represents, which sets the direction the first wall runs. topleft
thickness The default wall thickness for the outline. 4"

originx and originy

These place the starting corner on the drawing. At the default of 10 feet by 10 feet, SmartDraw tries to put your first corner 10 feet from the top-left of the canvas. It will always fit the whole room on the page, though, so if the room is large it may nudge the origin to make everything visible. You rarely need to set these for a single room. They matter most when you are positioning several rooms relative to one another, which we come to next.

Floor plan showing origin from top left of drawing area

corner

The corner value tells SmartDraw which corner your origin sits at, and that in turn decides which way the first Right wall runs.

With the default "topleft", drawing begins at the top-left and the first wall heads to the right, which is why all our examples so far walk clockwise from the upper-left corner. Changing "corner" is how you flip or rotate where a room begins, and it becomes essential when you attach one room to another and need its first wall to head in a particular direction.

corner value The first Right wall runs
topleft Horizontally, left to right
topright Vertically, top to bottom
bottomright Horizontally, right to left
bottomleft Vertically, bottom to top

thickness

This overrides the default wall thickness of 4 inches for the whole outline. Set it once on the "outline" line and every wall in that room uses it.

Floor plan showing consistent wall thickness

Building Bigger: Scripts, Multiple Rooms, and Points

A single script can hold as many outlines as you like. Each "outline" statement starts a new room, so a whole apartment is just several rooms listed one after another in the same script.

The interesting part is connecting them. You could work out the exact "originx" and "originy" for every room by hand, but that is tedious and error-prone. Instead, FPN lets you drop a named marker on one room and use it as the starting point of the next. The marker is a Point.

Defining and Using a Point

To place a Point, write "Point <Name>" at the spot along the wall where you want it. Here a Point named "Bathroom" is placed at the end of the first wall (the top-right corner), and a second room starts from it:

outline
Right Wall 20' Point Bathroom
Right Wall 12'
Right Wall 20'
Right Wall 12'

outline originx Bathroom corner topleft
Right Wall 10'
Right Wall 12'
Right Wall 10'
Right Wall 12'

The first room places the Bathroom point at its top-right corner. The second outline names that point as its "originx", so it begins exactly there, and "corner topleft" sends its first wall to the right, placing it alongside the first room. You never had to calculate a coordinate. Change the second room's "corner" value and it starts off in a different direction from the same point.

A few rules for Points:

  • A Point can be defined anywhere along a section, not just at a corner.
  • Each Point name must be unique within the script.
  • A Point must be defined before it is used as an origin. Define the room that carries the Point first, then the room that starts from it.
Rooms with a shared common wall

Placing a Point in the Middle of a Wall

You often want a Point partway along a wall rather than at its end. Split the wall at the spot you want and drop the Point between the pieces. To mark the midpoint of a 12-foot wall:

outline
Right Wall 12'
Right Wall 10'
Right Wall 6' Point Middle Wall 6'
Right Wall 10'

The "Point Middle" sits at the halfway mark of that wall that is still a single 12-foot run. Splitting the number does not split the wall; it just gives you a named handle at that position.

Creating a room with a point

Rooms with Common Walls

When two rooms sit next to each other and share a wall, the cleanest approach is to define the shared wall in both rooms. Each room is then a complete, closed shape, and the two overlap perfectly along the wall they have in common.

The payoff is that each room stands on its own. Because both are fully closed, you can move, resize, or restyle either one in the SmartDraw editor without tearing a hole in its neighbor.

Here are two rooms side by side. The first is 12 by 10, and we drop a Point at its top-right corner to anchor the second:

outline
Right Wall 12' Point SharedTop
Right Wall 10'
Right Wall 12'
Right Wall 10'

outline originx SharedTop corner topleft
Right Wall 10'
Right Wall 10'
Right Wall 10'
Right Wall 3' Door 3' Wall 4'

The second room starts at "SharedTop" and closes with a wall that runs right back along the first room's right-hand wall. The two share that edge exactly.

Notice the door. It lives on the shared wall, and it is written only once, in the second room. If you put a door or window on a shared wall, define it in just one of the two rooms. If you define it in both, the second room's plain wall will draw over the opening in the first and paint it shut.

Rooms sharing a common wall generated from floor plan notation

Quick Reference

outline [originx X] [originy Y] [corner topleft|topright|bottomright|bottomleft] [thickness T]
  Right|Left [Angle <deg>] <Feature> <length> [<Feature> <length> ...]
  ...
  <Feature> <length> Point <Name>        # marks a named position
  • Feature words: Wall, Door (PocketDoor, DoubleDoor), Window, Gap.
  • Turns: "Right" is clockwise, "Left" is counter-clockwise, 90 degrees unless you add "Angle".
  • Units: 12'. 12' 6", 4' 9 5/8", 3.5m, 1200mm. One system per outline.
  • Connect rooms: Drop "Point <Name>" on one outline, then start the next with "outline originx <Name> corner <Value>".
Door types reference

Tips for Writing Notation by Hand

  • Walk the room in one direction. Going around consistently, clockwise or counter-clockwise, keeps the notation easy to write and easy to read back.
  • Start at a distinctive corner. Your origin corner is your anchor. Pick one you will remember so you always know where the walk began.
  • One outline per space you can walk into. Give closets, alcoves, and bathrooms their own outline and connect them with a Point, rather than trying to trace everything in a single loop.
  • "Right" for outside corners, "Left" for inside ones. On a clockwise walk, that is the only rule you need for choosing between them.
  • Make the feature lengths add up. Every feature you list along a wall should sum to the wall's true length. This is the most common thing to get wrong, so double-check it.
Understanding floor plan notation

Import Your Floor Plan Notation Into SmartDraw

When you're ready, you can copy-paste your notation into SmartDraw. If you're just getting started, we recommend starting with a small, contained space like a bedroom that's easy to measure and verify you understand the notation before you build a full floor plan.

To import your notation, open any floor plan template and click Import Measurements in the SmartPanel on the left. Paste your floor plan notation into the import window, and SmartDraw will use your measurements to generate the floor plan.

Importing the notation directly into SmartDraw is the easiest and most reliable way of turning your measurements into an editable floor plan.

Importing floor plan notation into SmartDraw

Using Notation with AI

You can also use AI with floor plan notation, although we recommend the direct import method as more reliable. Both the SmartDraw AI floor plan prompt and the SmartDraw MCP will understand this notation. You can paste a notation block into the AI prompt or any instance of Claude or ChatGPT connected to the SmartDraw MCP server.

L-shaped room generated from AI

Examples

The examples below combine everything above. Paste any of them into SmartDraw to see the plan.

A Studio with a Door and Two Windows

outline thickness 4"
Right Wall 3' Window 6' Wall 3'
Right Wall 5' Window 6' Wall 5'
Right Wall 12'
Right Wall 2' Door 3' Wall 11'

A single room with a window on each of the first two walls, a plain wall, and an entry door on the last. The first and third walls are 12 feet; the second and fourth are 16 feet, so the room closes as a 12-by-16 rectangle.

Studio with door and windows example

An L-Shaped Living and Dining Room

outline
Right Wall 24'
Right Wall 12'
Right Wall 14'
Left Wall 10'
Right Wall 10'
Right Wall 22'

The "Left" turn creates the inside corner where the living area steps back from the dining wing.

L-shaped living and dining room example

Bedroom with an Attached Bathroom

outline
Right Wall 12'
Left Wall 2'
Right Wall 5' Window 6' Wall 5'
Right Wall 20' Point Bathroom
Right Wall 3' Door 3' Wall 4' PocketDoor 5' Wall 4' DoubleDoor 6' Wall 3'
Right Wall 18'

outline originx Bathroom corner topright
Right Wall 12'
Right Wall 10'
Right Wall 6' Point Closet Wall 6'

outline originx Closet corner bottomright
Right Wall 8'
Right Wall 6'

Each new outline chooses a corner value that points its first wall the right way relative to the room it attaches to. The bathroom starts at the "Bathroom" point with "corner topright", and the closet starts at the "Closet" point (placed midway along a bathroom wall) with "corner bottomright". This is the pattern for any multi-room plan: close each room, mark where the next one begins, and start the next room from that mark.

Bedroom with attached bathroom example