The drawing cleanup tools in AutoCAD Map contain eleven different types of cleanup actions.

Seven

of those are the most commonly used: deleting duplicates, erasing short objects, breaking crossing

objects, extending undershoots, snapping clustered nodes, dissolving pseudo-nodes, and finally,

simplifying objects. I'll also cover tolerance.

Tolerance is what gives you control over how these drawing cleanup tools work. In fact, setting the

tolerance is the basis of the cleanup behavior and results.

Tolerance is basically a radial search distance to locate geometric errors. Any objects that lie outside

of the tolerance value are ignored and are considered to be geometrically correct, while objects that lie

within the tolerance value are corrected. Entering the correct tolerance is critical to a successful

drawing cleanup. You can enter tolerance values by either typing them into this field, or by picking

distances in the drawing editor.

Deleting duplicate lines is exactly what it sounds like, except that Duplicates makes use of the

tolerance as well. In this example, since the endpoints of the two lines fall within the set tolerance,

they are considered to be duplicates and one of them will be removed. Be aware that drawing

cleanup ignores layers while determining duplicate objects. In most cases, deleting duplicates is

performed with a tolerance of 0.

Erasing short objects is another drawing cleanup tool that relies on tolerances. In this example, a

tolerance of one determines whether a line is a short object or not.

Breaking crossing objects does not require a tolerance value. Objects either cross, or they don't. The

drawing cleanup process breaks the lines where they intersect.

Extending undershoots is another cleanup action that relies on tolerance. Lines that should have

been extended are identified by falling within the tolerance, and those that don't fall within the

tolerance are considered to be geometrically correct. You can see the result of this by having the line

within the tolerance extended and intersected with the other line.

When snapping clustered nodes, the first thing to understand is that AutoCAD Map considers

endpoints of lines as nodes, as well as individual points themselves. In this example, the three

endpoints lie within the tolerance and are snapped together.

Dissolving pseudo-nodes is a drawing cleanup feature that does not rely on tolerances. In this

example, there are three lines that make up what should be a single element within the map. In

AutoCAD terms, dissolve pseudo-nodes joins lines together to create a single polyline.

Simplifying objects uses a tolerance to define a corridor along a series of objects. Any endpoints that

fall within the corridor are removed, thereby reducing the number of vertices and lowering the size of

your drawing.