Is Kubla the right tool for me?

Ah, thanks very much for the reply Ted. Much appreciated.

I am currently using your free version to see if this is the software I am needing to do takeoffs.

Another question I have is regarding the PDFs imported into Kubla.
Sometimes we are issued really bad 2nd generation PDF's and that does make things harder. Most of the time we get good 1st generation PDF's.
When importing them, it seems like Kubla then treats the 1st Gen PDF as a normal raster and it looses the ability to snap to contour lines. Is this just how it is, or am I doing something wrong while importing the PDF?

Currently there is no PDF vector processing in Kubla Cubed.  So both 1st Gen and 2nd Gen PDFs will be treated the same. 

Could it be that you were using a different program for the contour snapping.  What is likely is that the 2nd Gen ones are actually scanned from paper so are converted into images which are embedded into the PDF rather than vectors.  I can imagine the scenario you describe happening after that.

In Kubla Cubed 2019 (to be released next week) you can snap elements to each other but still you cannot convert PDF vectors to contours.  You can do this with third party programs and import them as CAD entities though.