Eyedropper tool not functioning — has letter T icon and just picks up black

[ComeHitherDesign]

Since updating to Illustrator 28.1 my Eyedropper tool no longer works.

It is stuck with a letter T next to it (see attached), and only picks up solid black when clicking on any element. I have double clicked the icon in the tool bar and turned everything off apart from fill and stroke and still no joy.

I restarted illustrator holding down Shift, Alt, and Command to reset my settings but no luck. 

Any ideas?

[Doug A Roberts]

That's what it normally shows when hovering on a text element. Can you show your file including the full workspace and the layers panel? What's in it?

[ComeHitherDesign · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the hint. I tried a new empty documeny and it didn't happen. I've now figured it out — I had a top layer, which contained some text, but it is locked and set to "do not print". Despite being on a lower, active layer, Illustrator was trying to select and sample from the top, locked layer. When I made this top layer invisible, the eyedropper returns to normal…

A bug that needs fixing I suspect?

[Doug A Roberts]

You can sample from locked objects. It's desirable to do sometimes. Do you think this shouldn't be the case?

[ComeHitherDesign]

It’s a bit counter-intuitive. I can move the text layer to the bottom to stop it happening, it's only an aide memoir, so unimportant: The set up is pretty unusual, so it’s unlikely to come up very often — I have about fifty illustrations to do, so set up a load of artboards and placed the titles of each illustration, in a massive single text box over the whole lot, with each title tabbed into the right place, and space after each paragraph to space them vertically (see attached). So one massive text box overlaying all drawn elements is going to confuse things! Would be handy if all the artboards could be named in bulk, but that's a whole other thing!

[Doug A Roberts]

Try the Batch Renamer script here:

https://github.com/creold/illustrator-scripts/blob/master/md/Artboard.md#batchrenamer

[Aaron Ncz]

Jesus for the f! of life. Thanks man, I've been having a rough time in the past few weeks. I have these small annoying things happening every single f!ing day recently, thanks!