Clipping mask problem: When I make a clipping mask for a map, the fill on the road signs gets removed.

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The road signs are not compound paths, just normal shapes. I tried grouping them and making the clipping mask a compound path -- no change. It looks like the signs are behind the roads, but if you look closely you can see that the fills have been removed when the mask was applied. I’ve tried every suggestion I could find, but no difference. Everything else in the map gets clipped correctly; it’s just the signs that get changed. Any ideas?

Kurt GoldCorrect answer

Community Expert

Thanks for the sample file.

There are a lot of zombie subgroups (entries with no contents) in some of the main groups and they may have something to do with the unusual behaviour.

I could quite simply resolve the issue by copying all, pasting into a new document (while the Paste Remembers Layers option is turned off) and then making the clipping group.

It is probably a case of corruption in the initial file.

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bubba61Author

Participant

That worked. It must have been a corrupt file -- that would explain some of the minor weird behavior as well. Thanks very much -- I was losing my mind over it.

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Kurt Gold

Community Expert

It would be interesting why there are the zombie groups and how they got injected in your file.

Normally, they should not exist at all, but sometimes they are created for unknown reasons. I sometimes face them after executing javascripts, but I cannot explain why they may or may not be there suddenly.

In any case, they cause irritations.

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Kurt Gold

Community Expert

Can you share this Illustrator file for inspection?

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bubba61Author

Participant

Here’s a stripped-down version that shows the problem -- the actual file is huge.

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Clipping_problem.ai.zip

Kurt Gold

Correct answer

Community Expert

Thanks for the sample file.

There are a lot of zombie subgroups (entries with no contents) in some of the main groups and they may have something to do with the unusual behaviour.

I could quite simply resolve the issue by copying all, pasting into a new document (while the Paste Remembers Layers option is turned off) and then making the clipping group.

It is probably a case of corruption in the initial file.

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