Most stage plans start the same way: somebody rules up a sheet of paper, marks a centre line, decides where the setting line goes, and works out how many millimeters a meter is at whichever scale the sheet will take. It is ten minutes of arithmetic before a single idea gets drawn, and it is ten minutes that goes wrong quietly if the paper turns out to be the wrong size.
This does that part for you. Put in the dimensions of the stage you are working on, in meters or in feet, choose a scale and a paper size, and you get a blank groundplan of that stage: centre line, setting line, playing area, wings, apron, a grid, the stage directions named around the edge, and a title block with blank rules for the show, the venue and your name. Nothing is on it but the room. What you draw on it is yours.
Print it at 100%, or none of it means anything
A scale drawing is a promise that every length on the page holds a fixed relationship to the real thing. Print it at the wrong size and the promise breaks silently: the plan still looks correct, but a scale rule laid across it now reads a set that will not fit the stage.
This is the single most common way a printed plan goes wrong, and it is almost always the same cause. Browsers and print dialogs default to shrinking a page slightly so that nothing is lost in the printer's unprintable margin, which is sensible for a letter and ruinous for a drawing. An A3 sheet fitted to A3 in this way comes out at about 95% of true size, so a plan you asked for at 1:25 is really at about 1:26.4.
So every sheet this tool produces carries its own check: a red line in the bottom left block, one hundred millimeters long, with the instruction printed beside it. Put a tape measure or a scale rule on that line before you take a single dimension off the drawing. If it measures 100mm, the sheet is true and everything on it can be trusted. If it does not, print again with scaling set to 100%, "Actual size", or "Fit to page" switched off, depending on which words your printer driver uses.
There is a scale bar beside it as well, and it is worth understanding why both are there. The scale bar is the older safeguard and it works differently: because it is drawn on the sheet, it stretches and shrinks with everything else, so a distance measured against the bar stays correct even when the print is wrong. The printed rule tells you whether the sheet is true. The scale bar lets you keep working when it is not.
What the lines on it mean
The two red lines are the datums, and every measurement on a theatre drawing is taken from one of them.
The centre line runs upstage to downstage through the middle of the stage. It is dashed in the long-short pattern that means "centre" on any technical drawing, and it is the line you measure left and right from. The setting line runs across it, and is where measurements upstage and downstage are taken from. On a proscenium stage it is usually set on or just behind the plaster line, which is the face of the proscenium arch itself. If those terms are new, plaster line and centre line explains what each one is and why the distinction matters.
The solid rectangle is the playing area: the part of the stage the audience sees and the set occupies. The dashed rectangle outside it is the wing allowance, the space either side you have to get scenery and people in and out through. It is drawn dashed because it is not a wall, it is a working assumption, and one worth having on the sheet while you are deciding how wide a truck can be.
Everything forward of the setting line is the apron, the part of the stage that sits downstage of the proscenium. Set it to zero if your stage does not have one.
Stage left and stage right are named at the edges, and they are the performer's left and right, facing the audience. On the sheet, stage left is on the right hand side, because a groundplan is drawn looking down at the stage from above with the audience at the bottom.
Meters or feet, and why the scales change with them
The tool works in either system, and switching between them changes more than the labels.
The UK and most of Europe draw theatre plans at 1:25 and 1:50. The US draws at 1/2 inch to the foot and 1/4 inch to the foot, which as ratios are 1:24 and 1:48. Those pairs are close but they are not the same: 1:50 and 1/4 inch to the foot differ by about four percent, which over a 12 meter stage is nearly half a meter.
That gap is exactly the kind of error a scale drawing is supposed to make impossible, and it is invisible while it is happening. Lay a quarter inch scale rule on a sheet drawn at 1:50 and every dimension comes back short, with nothing on the page to tell you. So the unit switch carries the scales with it: choose feet and you are offered the imperial scales, and the title block states the scale in the form your rule is marked in.
The rest follows from the same rule. The grid is one foot rather than one meter, the graduations up the centre line and along the setting line are in feet, the scale bar reads in feet, and the printed check becomes a four inch line rather than a hundred millimeter one, because a four inch line is the one your tape has a round number for.
One thing does not change: the dimensions you type are converted for you, so you can start in one system and switch to the other without re-measuring anything. Feet are rounded to the nearest half foot on the way across, because a stage measured with a tape is not known any closer than that and carrying six decimal places would only make the numbers look wrong.
Choosing a scale and a sheet
1:25 is the everyday scale for detailed theatre drawing in the UK, and it is the one to reach for first: at 1:25 a meter is 40mm on the page, and a doorway, a tread or the swing of a flat is large enough to draw clearly and measure with confidence. 1:50 halves that, which halves the linear size of the drawing and quarters its area, so it is what you drop to when 1:25 will not fit a sheet you can actually print. 1:100 is for the whole building rather than the set. In feet the three do the same three jobs: 1/2 inch to the foot for detailed work, 1/4 inch for a plan that has to fit a sheet, and 1/8 inch for the whole house. Drawing at 1:25 and 1:50 goes into how the two are read and when each is right.
The tool works out whether your stage fits the sheet you have chosen and tells you when it does not, along with the largest scale that would fit. That check is the reason to set the dimensions first and the paper second: a 12 meter stage at 1:25 is 480mm wide before wings, which is wider than A3, and finding that out from the printer is a wasted sheet.
If you only have an A4 printer and the drawing wants A2, most print shops will run a PDF at true size on larger paper for a couple of pounds. Take the PDF rather than a photograph of a screen, and ask for it at 100%.
What this will not do
It draws the room, not the show. There is no set on it, no furniture, no lighting, no seating, and no way to add any: it is deliberately a blank, because a template with somebody else's ideas already on it is a worse starting point than paper.
It also draws a rectangle. Most stages are close enough to one for a template to be useful, and where yours is not, the sheet is still the right grid and the right datums to draw the real shape onto by hand. A thrust, a traverse, an odd corner or a raked stage all get drawn on top.
If you would rather not draw by hand at all, the same stage will open in the drawing board below, with the same dimensions already set.
Last updated September 1, 2026