Automation with a reviewable boundary
SheetMason turns large drawing sets into individually named PDF sheets. It extracts labels from user-defined title-block regions, offers local OCR where appropriate, and keeps source crops alongside the values being reviewed. Originals remain read-only; exports are written to a new batch directory.
The application treats a label as a proposal until it is approved. Changes to the source, layout, or naming invalidate relevant approvals. Unsupported PDF features are rejected explicitly rather than silently discarded. Export manifests preserve the mapping from every output back to its source page.
Preservation and recognition are different questions
Validation checks page geometry, output rendering, hashes, duplicate names, cancellation, and recovery. In a bounded native-text workflow, ten reviewed pages passed production and independent preservation checks. Two titles still required punctuation-order corrections despite having no warnings.
Scanned documents exposed a different weakness. A tighter crop improved provisional label matches to 5 of 18 sheet numbers and 5 of 13 titles, while regressing two titles. Those results remain recorded. Preserving the PDF successfully does not imply accurate OCR or reduced operator effort.
Desktop reliability
The implementation also addresses practical desktop failure modes: cancelled worker startup, retained process handles, interrupted imports, export cleanup, and packaged Windows execution. It remains a local alpha while native desktop qualification, broader document coverage, and independent operator comparisons continue.
Limitations
- Unsupported forms, annotations, signatures, active content, and other unmodeled PDF features remain outside the support contract.
- OCR accuracy and operator time savings are not established.
- Not a signed commercial release; paid activation is unconfigured.
Source code & evidence
Results reflect the linked evidence snapshots. Source artifacts retain their dates and experimental conditions.
