Illustrator CC: join overlapping anchor points only

Question

A lot of the PDFs I end up working with are exported as thousands of completely separate lines, which creates performance problems in my workflow further down the process. The lines appear to be joined, but if you take one anchor off you will see they are in fact disconnected segments.

What I want is to join all the lines together, but only if they have overlapping endpoints, and nothing else. For this, the Ctrl + J (Join) operation creates excess lines for non-overlapping anchors.

I realize there is a free "Join overlapping anchor points" only script from shspage.com, but it doesn't work for Illustrator CC.

There was also the Shift + Ctrl + Alt + J join from Adobe's Blog which was helpful, but ended up not being what i needed either, since this will only work when I have two endpoints selected. This is more along the lines of what i'm looking for, but labour intensive when working with thousands of points.

Any of the pathfinder operations typically don't work with the massive amounts of complex shapes that come from floor plan drawings.

Compound lines or groups aren't an option either, since both of the endpoints still exist.

Is there an updated script or feature for Illustrator CC I can use to achieve this, or am I going to have to look into updating the script from shpage?

Answer 1

If you no longer have to edit your floor plans then pathfinder/unite is the way to go. Select all the lines. Expand fill and stroke (they can no longer be lines in order to unite, the need to be shapes that look like lines) then pathfinder/unite, ungroup and done (cleanup if necessary). All the lines that were touching are now a combined shape. All the independent lines retain their independence. I hope this is what you were looking for.

Answer 2

Try cmd + shift + alt + j

This should average the positions, and then join, meaning you don't get the horrible extra vertices.

To make a script to do this you'll need to seek out vertices that are close together and joinable, by your own rules, then average them, then join them.

I don't know of a script to do this.

In other apps, this activity is known as "welding" of vertices.

3ds Max has a very good tolerance based welding system, which works by distance, and reduces vertices, over all lines.

So, if you're on a PC, you could download a trial of this, and import your pdfs as illustrator files, select all lines, do a weld with a low tolerance, and then export as illustrator files to go on with in your favourite drawing program.