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S
sieberb9459372
Participant
October 18, 2019
Question

illustrator graphs: align values on tick marks

  • October 18, 2019
  • 3 replies
  • 2167 views

Hi,

For a redesign of a magazine containing a lot of graphs I'm making new illustrator templates. The templates look fine, but I'm still struggling with one thing. In the old templates the values were bottom-aligned with the (full width) tick marks. In my new templates the values are center-aligned, which seems to be the default in illustrator. The people of the magazine prefered the bottom aligned ones and want it back. I've made a new copy of an old one and the values seem fine now (see screenshot 1), but when I change the data and choose 'Override Calculated Values' new values jump back to the default center alignment (see top values in screenshot 2). Where can I change this and make sure that future values change the same way?

Thanks in advance

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3 replies

Sofia M
Sofia M
Known Participant
December 5, 2022

I'm getting this just now, very annoying that it doesn't aut-align when you chnage font size

S
S Hopkins
Inspiring
October 20, 2019

Hi,

The best that I can come up for you is the following using paragraph styles. 

1. Create a style for each of the ways legends are displayed: same font, leading, size, but different justification (flush left, flush right, centered)

2. For the style you want to drop/raise the baseline, under the Advanced tab set its Baseline Shift to whatever you need (use Preview to see the shift as you work with the setting).

3. Marquee-select legends with the direct selection tool to assign the appropriate paragraph style (one for each way legnds are styled).

4. Save your document. When you update the data or import new data, the paragraph styles should override and retain the styling. 

Note: I tried this with some bar graphs and it seems to work ok. 

S
sieberb9459372Author
Participant
October 22, 2019

Thanks,

This seems to work. I can do the same in the appearance panel (transform - move vertical). It's only weird that in the old template files none of these solutions was used.

When you take a look at Adobe's guide to graphs;

https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/graphs.html

you can see that in the first graphs the labels are default centered (see screenshot default)

but in the section 'add pictures and symbols to graphs' the labels are bottom aligned (see screenshot bottom) (they're floating a little bit above bottom actually). There must be a setting somewhere, but it's very well hidden.

    S
    S Hopkins
    Inspiring
    October 25, 2019

    Hi,

    I decided to see if anything for graphs was exposed for the purpose of writing scripts. Apparently the graphing segment of Illustrator goes back many versions (maybe to v1?) and has very little exposed. Sorry. 

    Mike_Gondek10189183
    Community Expert
    Mike_Gondek10189183Community Expert
    Community Expert
    October 18, 2019

    I honestly do not believe you can fix this automatically.

     

    With the hollow arrow tool drag and drop a selection frame over the type values that are off. Then use your cursor keys to nudge the type into place. Best to set your cursor key distance to 1 pt or maybe .25 pt, then write down the number of how you nudged, so you can fix for others and stay consistent.

     

    You also could copy the data values, create a new graph, paste the data values. Then nudge the values once. Future updates should  be good.

     

     

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