Line weight and Line color get lost

[Thomas265738242dgn]

I've done a line Illustration. To get a grey fill in the background I've made the outside Path. Therefore I made all the inner Lines invisible with Strg+3. When I finished the path and made the color fill and tried to make the Lines visible again with Alt+strg+3, all the Line weights and Line colors are gone. Of course I put the fill in the background.

Any idea?

[Monika Gause]

Could you please post some screenshots (before and after) that also display the settings you used?

[pixxxelschubser]

Please check that you are not accidentally in the outline view. And yes, a screenshot is always helpful.

[Thomas265738242dgn]

Thank you for your responses. I'm working with Illustrator for over 30 years by now. I never had that problem before. It happens since a few weeks only. Maybe it has to do with the regular updates. I'm using the swiss-german keyboard, therefore it could be a problem there. I had a large path with some "holes" (spots not to be filled) within this path. I put the holes into the foreground and the mainpath into the background. Then I selected all off them together and used the pathfinder symbol (the forth on the top row from the left) to connect all the pathes. I gave the path a color (10% black). so far everything went well like always. Then I hit the keyboard combination ctrl+alt +3 and everything showed up in the layer color, as long until I deselected all. After that I coudn't see the lines. Ok, I put the gray filled path into the background again with shift+ctrl+( . But I still saw no lines. Therefore I selected one of these lines and discovered, that it lost the weight and coler Information. The Line weights were 0.2 and 0.4 Points, the color were all 100% black, well, at least before I made them invisible with ctrl+3. I've got a very similar drawing to do, but I probably will finish it at the start of next week. I will be very careful to do everything right then and I will let you know what happened. Until then, I wish all of you a great week. Thank you.

[Monika Gause]

Please show your artwork.

[Thomas265738242dgn]

Here you you go Monika, that's the finished Illustration. But I doubt that this helps, but I might be wrong 🙂

[Monika Gause]

So you have path aligned to outside.

Then you use Pathfinder Exclude

Then you hide the artwork

Then you show it again and afterwards the outside aligned path is set to none?

And the selected path in the screenshot is one that vanished after hiding the artwork? Or is that what you see after unhiding the artwork? Screenshots need a context.

Can you reproduce that with a simple artwork?

[Thomas265738242dgn]

1. Complete Line drawing finisched

2. All thin Lines (0.2 pt) made invisible with ctrl+3

3. All thick Lines, which are not intersecting with the outside path or with the inner paths I've to determine made invisible with ctrl+3

4. All the elements (Elypses, Curves and Lines) which intersect with the outline and the inner paths cut with the C-key and made the part I don't need for the paths invisible with ctrl+3

5. Selected all the inside paths seperatly and connected them with ctrl+J, one after the other 

6. Locked all inside paths with ctrl+2

7. Selected all elements from the outside path and connected them with ctrl+J

8. Unlocked all the inside paths and put them all in front of the outside path with shift+ctrl+)

9. Selected all paths and connected them with the pathfinder tool (like described above)

10. Gave  this path (which of course still had all black outlines with 0.4 pt) a gray color (10% black). So far, everything went smooth like expected.

11. Put this path to the background with Shift+ctrl+(

12. Used ctrl+alt+3 to make the invisible elements visible again

13. All elements show up in the layer color while still selected.

14. Deselect them with the cursor by clicking outside the geometry

Boooooom.....where the hell have my elements gone? Discovered, that they all are still here, but all of them lost their Line weight and Line color. I made a few tests with simple graphics and had no problems there. So I don't know, if it has something to do with the size and complexity of the drawing, maybe. But I have this problem since some weeks, I never ever had that before. Ok I can copy the drawing and make the path I need seperately and put them together after that.

[Thomas265738242dgn]

With the last large Line drawing I didn't have any problems. Let's see if the problem comes up at a later project again. Hopefully not. Thanks for the help anyway.