Pathfinder's UNITE tool not working

[James25541434ggaw]

• Hello,
  I am on a new laptop without my old preferences. I am attempting to unite two shapes via Pathfinder as shown in the attached image. The ONLY way I can unite these two closed shapes is to place one ontop of the other. On my old laptop, I could drag one shape via one anchor to the other shape's anchor and they would unite, but that is not working here. All unite does is group the two objects in the layer panel. Working file not attached because the error on the forum is telling me it can't be attached. I cannot get the yellow paths to unite and I cannot unite the red paths.
  
  
• I have restarted AI.
• I have set the tolerance in the Pathfinder flyout panel to the smallest allowable number .001
• The paths are both closed
• I have copied and pasted the two objects into another document with no success.
• The paths are NOT compound (though that should make no difference.)

I can't for the life of me figure out what I am missing? I am on MacOS, ai 29.0.1

Any suggestions? Thank you!

[Monika Gause]

Please rename the file extension to PDF

Then you can upload the file.

[James25541434ggaw]

That's awesome, THANKS! Working file is attached.

[Doug A Roberts]

Not sure why Pathfinder doesn't see the shapes as contiguous. Shape builder does even with gap detection off. Give that a try.

[James25541434ggaw]

So this is odd, I selected both yellow objects and only the two yellow objects (verified in the layers panel) and shape builder gave the error "3 of 3 objects not converted" when only two objects were selected. And then, the option to "undo convert to shape (cmd+z) is available even though no shape it built. Any thoughts on that?

[Doug A Roberts]

In the file you shared the whole construct is in a clipping mask, though I wasn't sure if it was an artefact of saving to PDF or me opening it in an older version. If it's not, try releasing that first.

[James25541434ggaw]

That's odd, I just opened that pdf in Illustrator and it's not a clipping mask on my side.

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[James25541434ggaw]

That's odd; the pdf on my end, reverted is not within a clipping mask. But either way, I tried shape builder on the original .ai file.

[Doug A Roberts]

As I suggested, it's probably either because I'm opening on an older version of Illustrator or the PDF file. Either way, shape builder works as expected at my end.

[Ton Frederiks · Accepted solution]

I don't see a clipping mask, but could not get it to work yesterday (yes, shape builder works).

Looked at it again today and found that the line from the right object is not  straight.

If I make both points the same X position (here 6,8299 ), Unite works.

[James25541434ggaw]

Oh wow, I can't believe I missed that. Yikes! Thank you for taking the time to look into this for me, much appreciative. Thank you 🙏 Case closed!