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Sergej DAGDA
Participating Frequently
March 22, 2025
Answered

Leftover Anchor Points Causing Export Issues

  • March 22, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 571 views

I'm not sure if this bug still exists in the latest versions of Adobe Illustrator. It's not critical, but it's annoying and can waste time while you're trying to figure out what's wrong.

 

The issue is that when a project contains a lot of guide lines, and you delete one or several of them using Direct Selection instead of Selection, only the lines are removed—while the anchor points at the ends of the guides, as seen in the screenshot, remain.

This doesn’t cause any issues during regular work, but when you try to export a large-format image—for example, 5 meters wide at 150 dpi or higher to PNG—the program would crash every time.

Experiments showed that for some reason, Illustrator seemed to treat those leftover points as part of the artwork and couldn’t handle the load, especially on a canvas size of 5780×5780 mm, even if your design was much smaller on one side. Of course, this depends on the complexity and size of the project, the number of elements, etc.

 

If your layout starts acting up during export for printing, check whether there are any leftover points from deleted guides—they might be the cause.

Wishing everyone all the best.

    Correct answer Brad @ Roaring Mouse

    "What really surprised me was that guides are even connected to anchor points at all. "

     

    They are actual paths in the code for the file, so they require anchor points as they still have to be "drawn" between them. As you have the option in Illustrator to make and release guidelines at will, also with the ability to make any drawn object into a guideline, and vice versa, they need to be defines as paths.

     

    What can help is to marquee-select all your artwork and temporarily lock it, then Select All, and then Delete to get rid of these outliers. Then Unlock your artwork again. (You can do this in reverse too, by Selecting All, then DE-selecting your artwork objects, then Delete.)

     

    What would be nice if they had a routine that would warn you that you are deleting a guideline and "Do you want to delete the entire guideline" kinda thing.

     

     

     

    1 reply

    Jacob Bugge
    Community Expert
    Jacob BuggeCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    March 22, 2025

    Sergej,

     

    It is always best to keep the artwork as clean as possible at any time.

     

    Leftover/stray points are part of the artwork, as you can see if you hold Ctrl/Cmd and press A to show all (unlocked/unhidden) artwork; and they can cause other issues.

     

    When using the Direct Selection Tool you can simply press Delete twice, or you can hold Alt or Option when selecting one or more, thereby selecting the entire path(s).

     

      S
      Sergej DAGDAAuthor
      Participating Frequently
      March 22, 2025

      Hi Jacob,

      Thanks for your reply. I eventually figured out what was going on, but it took time, effort, and wasn’t obvious—so I decided to share the info with the community.

      You're absolutely right that a project should be kept clean. Unfortunately, that’s not always possible when several people are working on it and the canvas spans several meters with layers and everything else.

      It’s not exactly a bug—more like a feature that behaves in an unexpected way. These days, when deleting guide lines, I actually hit delete twice just to be sure. Funny enough, I think some of my former colleagues still don’t know about this 🙂

      What really surprised me was that guides are even connected to anchor points at all. I rarely paid attention to how the canvas edge looks in that mode. And if they’re not actively selected, they’re also not visible—so our junior colleagues should definitely be aware of this 🙂

      Brad @ Roaring Mouse
      Community Expert
      Brad @ Roaring MouseCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
      Community Expert
      March 22, 2025

      "What really surprised me was that guides are even connected to anchor points at all. "

       

      They are actual paths in the code for the file, so they require anchor points as they still have to be "drawn" between them. As you have the option in Illustrator to make and release guidelines at will, also with the ability to make any drawn object into a guideline, and vice versa, they need to be defines as paths.

       

      What can help is to marquee-select all your artwork and temporarily lock it, then Select All, and then Delete to get rid of these outliers. Then Unlock your artwork again. (You can do this in reverse too, by Selecting All, then DE-selecting your artwork objects, then Delete.)

       

      What would be nice if they had a routine that would warn you that you are deleting a guideline and "Do you want to delete the entire guideline" kinda thing.

       

       

       

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