Terrestrial laser scanning is an effective technology which can be used for 3D data acquisition in both indoor and outdoor scenes. Terrestrial laser scanning has been widely used in historical building preservation in recent years. Plan view,front view and section view drawing can accurately describe the real status of a building. Therefore it is very important for historical building preservation. However,it will cost much human labor and time because of interactive operation. A method of semiautomatic drawing of plan view,front view and section view of a building based on terrestrial laser scanning is proposed,which includes three procedures. Firstly,an orthographic depth image is generated by using terrestrial laser scanning data. Secondly,the linear features are extracted from the orthographic depth image. Finally,the results are refined by describing the detailed building elements. The efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method is examined.