Pencil tool fidelity(?) issue when smoothing lines

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
January 15, 2021
6 replies
1360 views

Hello,

I'm a professional illustrator, been using AI for years. I opened up my computer this morning and tried to work on a document in Illustrator and noticed the pencil tool having really weird behavior. The lines were coming out quite wobbly, and when I tried to retrace them to smooth them (a common part of my drawing guesture), it doesn't smooth, it adds more anchor points and makes it more wobbly. I tried looking it up and saw that it might be the fidelity setting but I hadn't changed the fidelity since last night. When I did turn smooth up to max, it made a slight improvement, but was still nowere near the behaviour I was used to. I tried hooking up my older Wacom and the problem persisted it's not the tablet. Reinstalled Illustrator and problem persisted. I booted up my old laptop tried the pen tool in Illustrator on that device. It worked exactly the way I expected. Same tablet, same version of Illustrator. Only thing that's different is the computer. I'm on a 2018 Macbook pro running Big Sur 11.1. The old laptop is on Mojave 10.14.4. Could it be the OS? I updated my new laptop weeks ago, I'm not sure why it would suddenly create a problem for Adobe.

I've attached a video that demonstrates what's happening. The first part is the weird, wobbly behavior I expereinced this morning on the Big Sur device. The second part is the behavior on the Mojave device. This is what I expect to happen with the pencil tool

test.zip

This topic has been closed for replies.

Srishti Bali

Community Manager

Hi all,

Sorry about the trouble this issue has caused. We've fixed this in the latest release. Please update Illustrator to v25.2.3 to get this fixed. Here's a link with more details: https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/601447-illustrator-desktop-bugs/suggestions/42559438-lines-...

Regards,

Srishti

michelew83603738

Community Expert

You might want to report it at:

https://illustrator.uservoice.com

Although they may already be aware of it.

You coul also tweet to them at: @jaswest to see if they have heard about it and have any quick help tips.

Monica Rief

Participant

I also had the same issue with the pencil tool. My pencil tool kept adding extra points when I tried to draw over it to smooth it out. After reading this conversation, I reverted to the previous version of Illustrator (25.0.1) and got it to work as it had before. Thank you for posting your update @annm89579550 ! I hope Adobe fixes this bug in their next update.

5

5JF9B

Participant

I too had the exact same issue with the pencil tool, right after Illustrator automatically updated this morning. When going over a line while drawing it adds a lot of extra points that it never did before. If you go over a line more that once, it keeps adding even more points. I know the problem is with the update, because I too reverted to the program prior to the update and the issue is resolved. Please, Adobe, correct this pencil issue in your latest update.