Guides

Short, practical guides to checking metes-and-bounds descriptions.

• How to check a legal description for closure
  What error of closure and precision ratio mean, how they are computed from latitudes and departures, and what a good closure looks like.
• Reading bearings, distances and curves in a legal description
  Quadrant bearings, azimuths, and the curve elements radius, arc length, delta, chord and chord bearing, with the formulas that tie them together.
• Finding the typo when a description does not close
  Common blunders in metes-and-bounds descriptions and the misclosure each one leaves behind, so you can find the bad call fast.
• Computing area from a metes-and-bounds description
  How the coordinate method finds the area of a tract, how curves add or subtract area, and converting square feet to acres.

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