Plan and profile sheets provide engineers and project managers with valuable information for preparing construction drawings and planning improvements.

The plan and profile sheet is a tool used in the discipline of civil engineering to communicate between engineers designing projects and the builders constructing projects. Designers produce “plans and specifications”, which include drawings of how to build the project (plans) together with written instructions, design criteria, and other guidelines (specifications).

Plan and profile sheets are created by CAD software, which is primarily used to create precise free-form drawings for scientific and engineering purpose. However, the creation of plan and profile sheets can be viewed as more of a mapping effort than a drawing one.

If a GIS product could create plan and profile maps, it would be able to take advantage of many of the features inherent in GIS software, such as attribute and scale based labeling, on-the-fly projection, and integration with a geospatial database.