Many times I get floor plans that are not the color that I prefer. I love black and white floor plans – I like to survey with black and white, plan when them in black and white, and if I need to upload them into a NMS, such as Cisco Prime, I fell they look much nicer as well. I do this because I use colors for the heat maps in Ekahau Pro, and I feel this is a much cleaner look. But how do we get them into B&W without spending a lot of time on them?
I wanted to share how I convert my plans to B&W when I get a colored PDF, such as the snippet of the floor plan below I received recently. This was a PDF, and as you can see, it has a lot of red walls on there. Using the Microsoft Snipping Tool, I snipped the floor plan from the drawing and I sanitized it quickly, removing names, etc, by using the “Custom Pen” and selecting the color white. It takes a few minutes to figure out how to do this, but when you do, it works well. For me it does, anyway.
Next, the floor plan needs to be saved. I save it as a .jpg file, then close it. Now I open it in Microsoft Paint, and then save it as a monochrome bitmap. See below:
Now the floor plan is saved in black and white. I close Microsoft Paint and then reopen the file again in Microsoft Paint, saving it as a .jpg. I do this last step because I sometimes find it doesn’t upload properly into Cisco Prime.
This only takes a few minutes and is well worth in if you want clean black and white floor plans without spending hours and hours on them, or spending a lot of money of software that will do it for you. There is a slight degradation on some floor plans, so you’ll have to see if this is good enough for you.
