Map Cleaner // User Guide

Map Cleaner helps you clean up architectural PDF floor plans by analyzing every drawing element and letting you filter, select, and remove unwanted content — furniture, electrical symbols, plumbing, dimensions, hatching, and more.

Loading a PDF

Drag and drop a PDF onto the canvas area, or click to browse. The PDF renders immediately and you can pan (middle mouse) and zoom (scroll wheel) right away.

Analyzing

Click the green Analyze button in the sidebar. The app parses the PDF content stream, extracts every drawing element, and categorizes them by color, line weight, shape type, and size. This may take a few seconds for large files.

After analysis, the filter panels appear in the sidebar and you can start cleaning.

Sidebar

The left sidebar contains all filter controls, custom groups, and the deleted items bin. Each section is collapsible — click the header to toggle.

Canvas

The main area displays the PDF with a dark grid background. The white area is the page. All visible elements render here, along with placed icons and evacuation routes.

Toolbar (Top-Left)

• ? — Help modal with all keyboard shortcuts
• Crop icon — Activate/deactivate crop mode
• Fire icon — Expand/collapse the evac map icon palette

Header

Shows the app logo, loaded filename, and the Export Clean PDF button.

Filters work with AND logic between dimensions and OR logic within each dimension. An element is visible only if its color AND weight AND shape type all pass.

Colors

Every distinct color found in the PDF gets a checkbox with a color swatch. Uncheck a color to hide all elements using it. Use All / None for quick toggling.

Line Weights

Shows each distinct line weight found. Heavy weights are typically walls; light weights are dimensions and detail lines.

Shape Types

Elements are classified as Lines, Curves, Mixed, Rectangles, or Text. Toggle each type on/off.

Size Filters

Min/max inputs for Path Length and Bbox Area. Enter a value to hide elements below or above that threshold.

Fonts & Text Sizes

Filter text by font family or point size. Each distinct font and size found in the PDF gets its own checkbox.

Selection works like professional graphic design software. You must click directly on an element's path — not just inside its bounding box.

Selected elements render in orange. Marquee selection checks actual path intersection, not just bounding boxes.

Right-Click Context Menu

• Create Group Type... — Name the selection as a reusable pattern group
• Delete — Hide selected elements (moves to bin)
• Select Similar — Select all elements matching the selection's properties
• Invert Selection — Flip the selection
• Select All Visible — Select everything

Groups let you define reusable patterns — like "Doors" or "Grid Bubbles" — and automatically find all matching elements across the drawing.

Creating a Group

1. Select the elements that form the pattern (e.g., the parts of one door)
2. Right-click → Create Group Type...
3. Name it (e.g., "Doors")
4. The app builds a sequence pattern with skips and scans the entire element list for matches
5. All matches are added to the group and selected so you can see them

Pattern Matching

The pattern captures: element order, colors, line weights, shape types, segment counts, bounding box dimensions (±10%), and path length (±10%). Skips between elements are preserved as wildcards.

Tuning a Group

Click the arrow next to a group to expand its detail panel. Uncheck individual match fields to broaden the search — the group re-runs live and the count updates. For example, unchecking Width and Height catches doors of different sizes.

Locking

Click the lock icon on a group to prevent its elements from being selected or deleted accidentally. Locked elements are skipped by click, marquee, select-all, and select-similar.

Deleted Items Bin

Hidden elements go to the Deleted Items bin in the sidebar. Click any entry to restore it. Use Restore All to bring everything back.

Architectural walls are drawn as multiple parallel lines. The Simplify Walls tool merges them into single clean centerlines — perfect for evacuation maps.

How It Works

1. Adjust the Squint slider — this controls how aggressively nearby lines merge (like squinting your eyes at the drawing)
2. Set the Output Weight — thickness of the resulting centerlines
3. Click Simplify
4. The app rasterizes all visible strokes with inflated width, runs skeletonization to find centerlines, and traces them into vector paths

Straighten Lines

After simplifying, click Straighten Lines to clean up the skeleton paths. This uses Douglas-Peucker simplification to reduce points, then snaps segments to 0°, 45°, 90°, 135°, or 180° within the Snap Tolerance.

Simplified wall centerlines are selectable, deletable, and included in the export. Everything is undoable with Ctrl + Z.

Click the crop icon in the top-left toolbar to activate crop mode.

• Drag the orange handles (corners and edges) to resize the crop area
• The area outside the crop dims to show what will be removed
• Press Enter or Escape or click the crop icon again to apply
• All interactions (selection, icons, routes) are blocked during crop mode — only crop handles work

The crop applies to both the canvas view and the exported PDF. Elements entirely outside the crop area are excluded from the export.

Map Cleaner includes tools for creating evacuation maps with "You Are Here" markers and pathfinding-based routes.

Icon Palette

Click the fire icon in the top-left toolbar to expand the icon palette. Available icons:

• FEC — Fire Extinguisher Cabinet
• AED — Automated External Defibrillator
• You Are Here — Numbered evacuation starting point
• Fire Extinguisher
• Stairs
• Elevator

Drag an icon from the palette onto the canvas to place it. Click to select, drag to reposition, drag corners to resize. Ctrl + C / V to copy/paste at mouse position. Delete to remove.

You Are Here Icons

Each "You Are Here" icon gets a number (1, 2, 3...) displayed on it. These numbers are for reference only — they don't appear in the exported PDF.

Clicking a "You Are Here" icon or any of its routes activates that tree — all other trees grey out so you can focus on one evacuation path at a time.

Drawing Routes

Hold Alt and drag from a "You Are Here" icon to any point on the map. A red preview line follows your cursor. On release, the app computes an evacuation route using A* pathfinding on a flow field that avoids walls and stays in corridor centers.

Routes from the same icon share corridors — the pathfinding uses a single Dijkstra tree per icon, so routes naturally merge in shared hallways and only diverge at branching points.

Route Editing

• Click a route line to select it
• Drag the endpoint handle to recompute the path
• Delete to remove a selected route
• Moving a "You Are Here" icon recomputes all its routes live
• Deleting a "You Are Here" icon removes all its routes

Route Styling

Right-click a route to open the style panel:

• Line Style — Dashed, dotted, or solid
• Line Width — Number input in points
• Pointer Style — Arrow, dot, or none at endpoints
• Pointer Size — Number input in points
• Color — Red, orange, green, blue, or black

Style changes apply globally to all routes and update live. The panel stays open while you adjust.

Click Export Clean PDF in the header to generate a fresh PDF from the current canvas state.

What's Included

• All visible vector elements (filtered elements are excluded)
• Visible text rendered in Roboto font
• Simplified wall centerlines
• Evacuation routes with arrows/dots
• "You Are Here" markers

Multi-Page Export

If you've placed multiple "You Are Here" icons, the export creates one page per icon. Each page shows the same cleaned map but only that icon's evacuation routes. Other icons (FEC, AED, stairs, etc.) appear on every page.

Crop

If a crop is set, the exported PDF uses the crop dimensions as the page size. Elements outside the crop area are excluded entirely — they won't be hidden content in the file.

Font

Text is embedded using Roboto Regular. The font is stored in the output PDF so text is selectable in any PDF viewer.