Legend

Question

Correspondence between Layers elements and artwork elements?

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
November 30, 2024
3 replies
793 views

Using the current version of Illustrator on Win11. I am a long-time, fairly competent but not expert user of Illustrator.

In a current project, I have having to extract many charts and graphs from the prior print PDF of a book. (The PDF and edition are ten years old; the original chart files etc. are long lost and too complex, in aggregate, to rebuild from scratch. The extraction method, to clean AI files, is working well.)

When I open a book page in PDF and delete all the unwanted content, two things happen.

First, I often find a "shadow" group of text from what seems to be the next page in the book, invisible except in Outline view. It's not selectable in any way I can find. (I have to find the right Clip Group in Layers and delete from there.) Mostly — why and what's going on with that?

Second, the page and chart are the usual jumble of separate bits and pieces, going back to the original drawing structure. Then the ID-to-PDF-to-AI conversion leaves more, such as colored rectangles behind the text. It's REALLY tedious to select these leftovers; I sometimes have to note a text block's location, move it, select and delete the colored bit (which was part of the background tint for the chart in the book), then move the text block back.

I have the Layers pane open and extended so that I can see everything, and I can often guess which Clip Group represents that phantom page text, and delete it. But not always, and when it comes to associating Unwanted Color Rectangle A with an entry in the Layer list... I don't see any kind of highlight or connection or way to tell which Path or Clip Group or whatever represents what element in the drawing. (Other than the tiny icons, which are only a bit of help. So, lots of select-delete-d*mn!-Ctrl-Z.

So — question — when I have such a file open, is there ANY way to associate a Layer entry with a drawing element, or vice versa? Is there any overall easier process to weed out the unwanted (PDF-export) clutter? All better methods solicited.

This topic has been closed for replies.

James Gifford—NitroPressAuthor

Legend

Okay, I found what I was missing here. I am not sure if I never asked quite the right question, or if I misunderstood @Monika Gause's directions. I see now that clicking on the small circle icon associated with each Layer entry highlights the corresponding drawing element — and that's probably as complete a solution as I need or could ask for.

To be fair, though —

Monika's suggestion seems to point to the "magnifying glass" in the search panel, and "searching" for the item I sought. As almost none of the elements in my work PDFs have any sensible name, this was not a useful approach.
I can't find any reference to a "spyglass icon" in AI. At all. So if that's a name for the little highlight icon, I missed the reference. I can't seem to find a name for this little icon, but the pop-up tip simply describes its function, without giving any reference name. Even the Adobe Help pages I searched don't reference this icon or address the lack of highlighting between list and element. (Please feel free to point me to a Help entry that addresses this icon's function in selecting elements...)
I still find it odd/less than optimal/useless that simply selecting an item in the Layers list does not highlight the corresponding element in the drawing; from two decades of expereince with Adobe apps, that's a nearly universal association between component lists and document elements. Having to find and figure out a completely separate mysterious icon is... odd and confusing. And that it doesn't work in reverse, highlighting the list item when a drawing item is selected... even more odd. To me.

I tried to make my questions as clear as possible, but as only a workaday Illustrator user, I missed some turns with terminology and function. (I deal with such guessing-game terminology over in ID all the time, so I know it can be misleading.) Thanks for the answers given, though.

ETA: and I now see that a magnfying glass/"spyglass" appears in the list item to do this selection... but only after I have used Search to reduce the list to, say, <Clip Group>s. I'm sure this functionality all has a purpose, reason and history, but having to search for an element, then guess at which one might be the desired one, then hovering to bring up the 'spyglass,' then clicking it to return to the full Layers list and have it highlighted in the drawing... okay.

Just hoping this excursion helps some other lost soul some day. 🙂

Monika Gause

Community Expert

I was referring to this: https://youtu.be/qLRbbHrr4vM

Sorry for dark interface, it's almost illegible, currently I have to use it.

Kurt Gold

Community Expert

I would also request at least one or two sample files with specific instructions, so one can inspect and probably provide some satisfying approaches.

Monika Gause

Community Expert

You know that you can search elements in the Layers panel?

The selected elements can be found by clicking on the spyglass icon.You can also search by name.

You maybe want tocheck out the VectorFirstAid plugin.

A sample PDF could help.

James Gifford—NitroPressAuthor

Legend

These are not organized files — they are the gobbledegook created by a PDF export and then import of that page into AI.

What I'd like, and I am surprised to see doesn't exist, is a simple highlight in the Layers list when an element is selected —which seems to be the model for everything else in the Adobe suite. (That is, if I select an item in an InDesign layout, the corresponding style, object, element etc. lists light up.)

So, unless you've created your AI file with good practices and named everything sensibly, how do you locate, say, a small colored rectangle behind some text? I can eventually burrow in and select it, or I can work down the list of Layer items and delete them (then restore if it's the wrong one).... but a simple correspondence between drawing elements and Layer items... is nonexistent?

Here's a typical page I've exported from the original print PDF of ca. 2014 —

Never mind that it's a bit of a mess, all I want to do is delete everything but the contents of one of the two charts, so that I have a clean, editable version I can place in the new edition.

Here's the same page in Outline view —

This one seems to have two other pages' text ghosted into it. Those are single Clip Groups, so once I figure out which CG in the Layers list is theirs, I can delete them — but that's a guessing game and I can't find any way to directly select these "phantoms" in the drawing.

And here's about one quarter of the Layers list for the same page —

Once I've deleted most of the page text and content, all that's left is dozens of <Path> and <ClipGroup> entries, with a few semi-identifiable parts of the actual chart elements.

Many of the elements in the 'stripped' page are not selectable by any method I know of, until I select (for example) a top text frame and move it out of the way. No "click through" or "select next object" method works. And some items, like those phantom text blocks, are not selectable in the drawing at all; I can only guess at which Clip Group to delete until they go away.

So if there's some aspect of AI that will let me select the unwanted elements for deletion, using either direct-select methods or the Layers list, I'd love to be pointed to it. I'm again surprised that there is no correspondence between the drawing elements and the component list... that would make it trivial.

Monika Gause

Community Expert

You should be able to select anything using the direct selection tool. And when it's selected it will be highlighted in the Layers panel. Or you can locate it with the spyglass button.

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