Home > Edit > Clean Up: Merge Coincident Points

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Merge points sitting on top of each other so shared vertices join.

Menu: Edit > Clean Up: Merge Coincident Points | In depth: Cleanup

Two points sitting on top of each other look like one point and behave like two. Clean Up merges them, so the edges that were supposed to share a corner actually share it.

This matters because Fill and Region need a closed boundary. Four segments drawn end to end look closed, but if each end is its own point the boundary has four gaps in it, each one a thousandth of a millimeter wide, and nothing will fill. Clean Up is the fix, and it is usually the answer when a shape that obviously closes refuses to.

Running it opens a box for a distance, starting at 0.01 in drawing units. Points within that distance of each other are treated as the same point. Enter 0 to merge only points that are exactly coincident.

The number matters more than it looks. Too small and nothing merges, which is the case where you close the box and wonder what happened. Too large and points that were genuinely different get welded together. Start at the default, look at what it reports, and go up by a factor of ten if nothing moved.

The oldest one. Of a cluster sitting in one spot, the point created first is kept and the others are merged into it. Everything that referred to a merged point is repointed at the survivor, so nothing downstream breaks or goes looking for something that is no longer there.

Some merges would quietly destroy work, and Clean Up refuses those and tells you how many it refused.

A derived point is not merged away. A polygon's computed corner, for instance, is derived so the shape stays regular when a driver moves; merging it into a coincident point would turn it into an ordinary point and the shape would stop being regular the next time you touched it. That is not tidying, it is damage, so it is skipped.

Any merge that would leave a degenerate object, a segment with both ends at the same place, or an object referring to itself, is skipped for the same reason.

Points the node graph owns, and scaffolding points, are left out of it entirely.

Afterward you get a count of both numbers: how many points were merged, and how many were skipped. A run that reports skips is worth reading rather than ignoring, since it is telling you the drawing has coincident points that genuinely should not become one.

The whole thing is a single undo step, so one Cmd-Z puts every merged point back.

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• In the node graph: Cleanup - run the same cleanup as a node.