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.
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.
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. A loading spinner appears automatically if the PDF takes more than a second to process.
After analysis, the filter panels appear in the sidebar and you can start cleaning. PDFs with a /Rotate flag (common in architectural plans scanned or saved in landscape orientation) are handled automatically and display correctly.
After analysis, a Decode Text button appears below the Analyze button. Some PDFs use custom font encodings that cause text to display as random symbols or garbled characters. Click Decode Text to auto-detect the character mapping offset for each font and fix the displayed text.
You can drop a new PDF onto the canvas area at any time while working. A confirmation dialog appears before replacing the current session, so you won't lose work by accident.
The left sidebar contains all filter controls (in a single "Filters" accordion), lock groups, and the deleted items bin. Each section is collapsible — click the header to toggle.
The right side panel is always visible and shows details of the currently selected element — color, line weight, shape type, size, and path length.
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. A contiguous selection slider appears at the bottom of the canvas with a frontier glow effect when elements are selected.
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.
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.
Shows each distinct line weight found. Heavy weights are typically walls; light weights are dimensions and detail lines.
Elements are classified as Lines, Curves, Mixed, Rectangles, or Text. Toggle each type on/off.
Min/max inputs for Path Length and Bbox Area. Enter a value to hide elements below or above that threshold.
Filter text by font family or point size. Each distinct font and size found in the PDF gets its own checkbox.
The canvas toolbar includes a Lock Text button (padlock with T icon). When enabled, text elements cannot be selected by clicking or marquee dragging. This is useful when cleaning up vector elements (lines, curves, shapes) without accidentally selecting text that overlaps them. Click the button again to unlock text and make it selectable.
The ghost icon in the canvas toolbar controls the visibility of filtered-out elements. These appear as faint shapes behind the visible content so you can reference what's been hidden without re-enabling filters. Deleted elements are not shown in the ghost layer.
Click the ghost icon to open the control panel:
Selection works like professional graphic design software. You must click directly on an element's path — not just inside its bounding box.
| Action | How |
|---|---|
| Select element | Click on it |
| Add/remove from selection | Shift + Click |
| Select all with same properties | Ctrl + Click |
| Marquee select | Click + drag on empty area |
| Toggle marquee | Shift + drag |
| Select all visible | Ctrl + A |
| Deselect all | Escape |
| Delete selected | Delete / Backspace |
Selected elements render in orange. Marquee selection checks actual path intersection, not just bounding boxes.
When a selection contains more than 5,000 elements, the app switches to a lightweight display mode: instead of highlighting each element individually, a dashed orange bounding box is drawn around the entire selection area and an info message shows the element count. This prevents the browser from freezing when working with very dense drawings.
Select Exact finds all elements that are an exact match on color, weight, shape, and pathLength. Select Similar uses exact color/weight/shape but allows ±3% pathLength tolerance. For text elements, Select Similar matches by font name and ±20% font size.
Lock Groups let you define reusable patterns — like "Doors" or "Grid Bubbles" — and automatically find all matching elements across the drawing. Locked elements render green on the canvas (including text) and are protected from selection and deletion.
The Group Pattern system uses cluster-based matching: element order does not matter, matching uses ±5% path length and ±50% bounding box area tolerance, and handles rotation and mirroring of repeated elements.
A precision slider (tight to loose) controls match sensitivity. Group Pattern auto-selects matches and updates live as your selection changes.
The sequence 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.
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.
Locked elements are skipped by click, marquee, select-all, and select-similar. They render in green on the canvas. Right-click a locked element to Unlock it (removes it from its lock group).
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.
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.
The Wall Trace tool lets you manually draw wall lines on top of a PDF floor plan. Click the polyline icon (line with dots) in the top-left toolbar to activate trace mode. A Trace Options panel opens automatically.
The panel is draggable and opens automatically when trace mode is activated. Closing the panel exits trace mode.
Traced walls are included in evacuation route pathfinding — the flow field treats them as walls, so routes will go around them. Icons and routes take click priority over trace placement; the trace tool only places a point when no icon or route was clicked.
Traced walls export to PDF with the correct color, weight, and corner style. If the map layer is hidden (eye icon toggled off), the exported PDF will contain only traces, routes, and icons — no original PDF elements or text.
Click the crop icon in the top-left toolbar to activate crop mode.
The crop applies to both the canvas view and the exported PDF. Elements entirely outside the crop area are excluded from the export. Cropping also improves rendering performance — elements outside the crop boundary are skipped during drawing, so cropping out dense areas of a plan makes the canvas noticeably faster.
Map Cleaner includes tools for creating evacuation maps with "You Are Here" markers and pathfinding-based routes.
Click the fire icon in the top-left toolbar to expand the icon palette. Available icons:
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.
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.
Hold Ctrl 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.
Right-click a route to open the Route Options panel. The panel is draggable and only closes via its X button.
The Route Options panel also includes styling controls:
Style changes apply globally to all routes and update live. Exported PDF arrows match the canvas rendering exactly (size, offset, color, style).
Click Export Clean PDF in the header to generate a fresh PDF from the current canvas state.
Click Export Image to export the current view as a raster image. A dialog lets you configure:
The dialog shows projected pixel dimensions and estimated file size as you adjust settings. The exported image includes all visible elements and text, respecting crop and rotation. Raster images render identically in every viewer — no PDF rendering differences between applications.
If the map layer is hidden via the Wall Trace panel's eye icon, the exported PDF excludes all original PDF elements and text — only traced walls, routes, and icons are included. This is useful for exporting a clean traced floor plan without the underlying PDF content.
When loading a multi-page PDF, a page picker with thumbnails appears. Thumbnails load progressively (scroll priority, 200px @ 90% JPEG quality). Select a page to extract and analyze it individually for faster performance.
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.
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.
Text is embedded using Roboto Regular. The font is stored in the output PDF so text is selectable in any PDF viewer.
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
| Middle Mouse + drag | Pan |
| Scroll wheel | Zoom |
| Click | Select element |
| Shift + Click | Add/remove from selection |
| Ctrl + Click | Select all similar |
| Drag on empty | Marquee select |
| Shift + Drag | Toggle marquee |
| Ctrl + A | Select all visible |
| Escape | Deselect / close crop |
| Delete | Delete selected |
| Ctrl + Z | Undo |
| Ctrl + Shift + Z | Redo |
| Ctrl + Y | Redo |
| Ctrl + C | Copy icon |
| Ctrl + V | Paste icon at cursor |
| Ctrl + Drag | Draw evacuation route from You Are Here icon |
| Shift + Drag (route point) | Snap route point to 45-degree angles |
| Double-click (route segment) | Insert new route point |
| Enter | Apply crop / Finish trace |
| Right-click | Context menu / Route style panel |
| Wall Trace Mode | |
| Click | Place trace point |
| Shift + Click | Constrain to horizontal/vertical |
| Double-click / Enter | Finish current trace |
| Escape | Cancel trace (2nd press exits trace mode) |
| Ctrl + Z | Remove last trace point |
| Ctrl + Click (segment) | Delete trace segment |
Lock Text is a button toggle in the canvas toolbar (padlock with T icon). Decode Text is a button below the Analyze button in the sidebar.