_How do I rotate the view in Ai?

[Hugh Betcha]

_How do I rotate the view in Ai? - seems simple - can't find it....

[jp30]

Yup, getting a kric in my neck right now from tipping my head 90° trying to edit type in a supplied die-line for a packaging job. Since the size of my type changes when I retype or kern it as it wrapping around an image, finding a consistent center of rotation would be a challenge. The hack of adding an extra box around it and the (locked) image it's wrapping around is doable, but a royal pain, and can easily be messed up if working quickly.

[d0nut247]

Testing the pre-release 2017 version and I can't comment on the features that may have been added, but my neck is also still sore! FFS

[Mike Bethany]

People that lack imagination and want other to too always amaze me.

There are literally (and yes I mean literally) BILLIONS of uses for this. Here's just one:

When designing a brochure you may have to design one side upside down (depending on your printer). It is substantially easier if you can rotate your artboard.

The next time you don't see a need for something maybe you'll realize it's your lack of imagination that's the problem, not the request.

[Wade_Zimmerman1]

people often use Illustrator for package design as well and that would make it easier to work on side panels and end flaps as well.

Any type of item that folds could also bebenfit from the feature.

Not even going that far but many illustrations can be of a nature were you would at times want to work at a veiw that is rotated as say it were an illustration with many figures it like gargoyles type figures and some were arranged at different angles and yo need to integrate these figures in such a way as they had a seamless joined relationship. So it would be easier to edit these figures once arranged by rotating the canvas.

Yes there are many uses for this feature one often works on art art work upside down and one often looks at the work upside down in order to get a feeling as to hwo the art is balanced and even to notice things that might be over looked from starng at it too long rightside up.

But though there are many uses for such a feature aI would not go as far as to say that someone is not imaginative just because they have not encountered the need for the feature.

Your explanation I think is probably well enough stated to show if not the poster you were addressing the need for this then at least members of the team that might chime in or look in on this thread.

You might make a feature request for this I made one a long time ago and I got feed back at the time that it was not in the cards. That might have cahnge though because of the Cloud so try it.

[Mike Bethany]

"I would not go as far as to say that someone is not imaginative just because they have not encountered the need for the feature."

If that's how you understood me I didn't do a good job of expressing myself. Let me try again:

A person is unimaginative if they can't imagine uses, or things, for which they have no need.

I find it especially troubling when creatives argue about how "useless" a feature is to them, so it must be useless to everyone. That is the antitheses of creativity.

[ConnectedCreative]

God I WISH their was a rotate view. I work in packaging so I have to either amend 5 point copy reading it up-side-down (try doing that for hours when you're tired!) or I have to rotate the box, fix the copy then rotate it again remembering it's position. If only the 1000+ bits of artwork were created with the front of pack on the bottom so the back of pack—where all the detail is—is right way up. It leads to so many mistakes!

WISH, WISH, WISH.

[Guest]

And sadly I can report that this feature has not been implemented in AICC.

Keep submitting feature requests!!!

[Nicholas Avallone]

Rotate artboard/canvas would be immensely useful to those of us who use Illustrator for package design. I'm creating box art that needs to be read in more than one direction (top, bottom, sides, etc.) And the file has multiple layers, multiple objects, layout lines, cut and trim marks, masks, etc. etc. There is no way to rotate all that stuff safely.

[LauriAaltio]

i am designing a package and cant believe that there is not such a function. hard to make the upside down side of package

[rcraighead]

Yep. I think the best workaround is to build the side as a Symbol then rotate the symbol into position.

[MorituriMax]

Amen to that... for the people who keep commenting that there is no real use for rotating the canvas/artboard, and that "real" artists have never had this feature on easel mounted canvas...

...if this is the case... why do ANY programs have a rotate feature.. including Photoshop.

[Mr_Bimg]

Rotating the view (as in Photoshop) has a huge functional vantage. When using a tablet and drawing out curved lines with pencil/brush you can't get a smooth stroke left and right. The advantage of quickly rotating the screen (not tools or artboard) is to give you optimal angle with your hand to perform a smoother stroke. Here we are years later still needing to rotate the actual artwork to get nice horizontal hand drawn lines.

Adone, PLEASE add this function to a realease soon. I am an artist that scans in artwork and trace my lines only wishing it could behave like Photoshop.

[craigwhite2008]

Being able to rotate the canvas at will is great for any kind of drawing, vectors or pixels. It lets the artist hit that angle more easily without having to contort their body to match the monitor. You draw much?

[Swandive stream]

Well I'm designing a pyramid box net and a lot of the content is at an angle so rotating the view would be handy.

[BDA-SA]

If you are working on packaging. Say a box, (set up flat for print). Which you will be editing. Sometimes it is simpler to rotate the VIEW not the actual artboard. That way I do not have to be twisting my head to read all four sides. In design does this and it is useful when a piece of the design is opposite to the rest like a perforated side of a brochure that is landscape vs portrait. It would be nice to this in illustrator.

[pezz74]

I totally agree - we work on a lot of packaging that has to be supplied to the printer in Illustrator - it would be soooooooo helpful to be able to rotate the view so you can work on all sides without straining your neck. To rotate the whole artboard is not always a solution and also can be dangerous as you risk things being out of alignment when you rotate it back again.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE Adobe add a rotate view to the next update of Illustrator!

[josh.ferguson]

I need to be able to rotate the canvas in Illustrator, I'm working with complex dielines for packaging and a lot of the time the artwork is upside down because of how the material needs to be cut and folded.  It is utterly ridiculous that this program does not have a simple rotate canvas command.

[Monika Gause]

It is utterly ridiculous that this program does not have a simple rotate canvas command.

If you want this solved, make a feature request.

Feature Request/Bug Report Form

As long as it is not solved, you could try and work with symbols.

[josh.ferguson]

I filed a feature request, but I can't use symbols because I'm not supposed to edit the art.  I'm checking the dieline proofs before print so I need to be able to read all the words and check spelling and stuff without actually editing anything.

[uiarchitects]

I'm working on plan and elevation views for a building, working in Illustrator for ideation because I'm used to it and fast with it. I've never missed a rotated view feature, but I do now! Elevation and plan views are at 90° from each other in order to align walls across the two, and jumping the view 90° would be great.

Monitor rotation doesn't do the trick because of course mouse/trackpad input is 90° off from what you are looking at. Short of a rotated view, the only alternative is rotating all objects back and forth, which is impractical for a couple of reasons. One, I often have sets of layers locked, and unlocking, reselecting and relocking puts waaaay to much drag on the process. Also, I do not trust illustrator to maintain object geometry going back and forth in transformations - the lack of floating point accuracy always seems to randomly change measurements in even simple transforms. (E.g., an item I'm working with in this drawing that is 24 points wide wants to become 24.001 points wide every time it's touched. When that happens to a bunch of objects, over time things drift out enough that it starts messing things up and shift-drag doesn't end up aligning objects, etc.)

[rcraighead]

This is STRICKLY a workaround.

Could you convert each view to a Symbol, keeping original art in horizontal view and rotating the placed Symbol instance?

This method would let you share custom colors, Styles, brushes, etc.

[Jacob Bugge]

Some years ago, someone (at least sometimes) less silly than I gave the answer: put the monitor on its side (for 90 degrees, on its top for 180 degrees, (add) accessories for other angles).

[JETalmage]

It's one of the reasons I don't care for a stylus/tablet. It introduces a cumbersome tablet just to change the shape of the pointing device to that of a pencil.

That introduces the problem of the tablet's rotational orientation not being sensed through the pointing device, as it is through the shape of a regular mouse. So the grid of the tablet provides that orientation. That's not really sensed as you draw with the stylus while looking at the monitor. The angle of your movements is dependent upon the orientation of the tablet relative to the screen, rather than the movement of the pointing device relative to the screen.

Put that fuctionally back in the context of a mouse: You've just made it necessary to "correctly" rotate your desk under your computer, just to achieve something you consider a "more natural" arm movement.

With either scheme, you've decided to become married to your precious stylus. And you find yourself dissatisfied, and requesting that every software publisher add a feature that tries to treat the real-world horizontal/vertical orientation of the monitor pixels as if they are rotated when they're not.

Consider a wireless stylus which requires no tablet and is round, with no button or or other feature to determine its rotation. That's essentially a "pencil" equivalent to what turned out to be the most horribly-designed pointing device ever conceived: the origninal round mouse of the early G4 Macs. In other words, it's just a pencil-shaped mouse that works on any surface.

Now put a button on the side of the stylus like that on a Wacom stylus. If your index finger is on that button, you have a tactile rotational sense of which direction is up on your monitor; which is what the orientation of the tablet provides now.

You can use this stylus on any surface. That surface can be any shape, size, or orientation, just as your desk can be when using an ordinary mouse. If you want to hold that surface in your lap, just pick up a clipboard. But would that satisfy? No, because the monitor is still real-world horizontal when your particular "natural feeling" "sideways" movement is not.

So a software vendor complies, and develops who-knows-how-convoluted software routines to make the screen image act as if it's rotated to correspond to your particular "natural feeling" angle. You claim to be so happy because now you make what feels like a "natural" horizontal forearm movment, and it draws "horizontally" across the rotated display of the virtual page edge displayed in the program.

But move your forearm in your "natural feeling" upward direction to go select a menu command. The menu bars, the frame around the view of your software has not rotated to your "natural" angle. So how come users who sing the praise of this feature, and curse programs which don't provide it, don't at the same time complain loudly that the menus haven't rotated? (Could it be that they have found it necessary to make concession to the real world?)

Now....

Those of you married to tablets: Mount your LCD monitor on a back-side pivot and physically rotate the whole monitor. Suddenly, not only is the page display visually rotatable to your "natural" angle, but its menus rotate accordingly too. "Up" is "naturally up" whether you're drawing a cartoon blob stroke or selecting a menu command. Isn't that more representative of what you are trying achieve by demanding a fake "rotation" feature in every graphics program? Isn't that the real way to make your computer mimic the angle at which you are holding that tablet in your lap? Isn't that the functional and visual equivalent to rotating the "paper" on which you are scribbling with your "pencil"? And, egads, it works in every program you've got! With zero performance hit! It's just not as "cool" as having some artsy-tartsy make-me-feel-special feature built into the software.

Once again, the emperor has no clothes.

JET

[Jacob Bugge]

James,

I like your pivot solution: the right accessory.

[JETalmage]

It'll never fly, though, because stylus devotees will then complain that the menus don't read in the real-world horizontal when they pull them down. We can't make senstive artsy types tilt their heads to read, any more than we can expect them to change the angle of their forearms when they draw. So they'll be all over the software vendors to provide a software fake that auto-senses the tilt of the monitor and adjusts all popups and dropdowns to compensate.

That's what we need: A sailboat clinometer on a monitor bezel, with a USB cable sending an "up-is-thataway" signal to the OS.

JET