First steps

From opening the app to your first markup in five minutes. The rest of this manual goes deeper.

What you need

Open a plan, pick up the Apple Pencil, get going. This manual shows Cloya on the iPad in dark mode, the way you hold it. You navigate with your finger; a keyboard makes everything faster on top of that.

For viewing and simple markup you need no subscription. The Free scope is enough to read along and draw along.

Five minutes to your first markup

  1. Open a plan. Tap a document in your storage, whether local, in iCloud or in a connected cloud (BIMcloud, SharePoint, WebDAV and the rest, see Documents & cloud). Cloya opens PDFs and DWG/DXF directly.
  2. Choose the pen. In the main toolbar at the top, tap the pen symbol (or press P). The sub-palette appears under the toolbar, with line width, colour and stabilisation.
  3. Draw. You draw with the Apple Pencil and scroll and zoom with your finger. Cloya tells the two apart by itself. New strokes always start in ink black, by the way; if you want red, you choose it deliberately.
  4. Correct. The eraser (E) removes whole strokes or parts of them; undo sits on the right of the toolbar (⌘Z with a keyboard).
  5. Done. Cloya saves as it goes. Your markups live in the document itself, an ordinary PDF that any PDF viewer opens and shows exactly as Cloya does.
Ink Pencil Marker
Pen active: the sub-palette floats under the toolbar, with pen type, width slots and the five colour slots. The active slot carries the blue ring.

How Cloya differs from other PDF apps

Cloya is not a PDF app with markup bolted on; it is built for reading plans from the ground up. Tools, appearance and workflows are tuned to each other, and a plan always looks equally clean, even in the middle of a shared session.

The document stays a PDF throughout. What Cloya writes opens in every PDF program and looks exactly as it does in Cloya. It stays editable for Cloya through the embedded data backpack, which you can strip off at any time before sending it.

And Swiss planning reality is standard equipment: dimensioning follows SIA 400, fire safety follows the AEAI categories, and quantities have a ribbon tool of their own.

Where to go next

Next, the interface is worth a look. If you would rather get straight to work: Marking up & commenting and Measuring & quantities are the two chapters with the most everyday use.