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Question

Removing Overlapping And Intersecting Line

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
October 29, 2024
3 replies
2022 views

I deal with very complex SVG pics daily. Is there any way to remove overlapping and intersecting line automatically? Any scripts or plugins maybe to help with this process?

This topic has been closed for replies.

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Bobby Henderson

Community Expert

I'm not sure if there is anything in the market, even with plugins, that can automatically trim overshot lines in artwork. Part of the problem is that defining what is an overshot line can be a subjective call. Any sort of automatic function can end up deleting parts of paths or even entire paths that weren't supposed to be deleted. That can be a big issue with things like CAD-generated artwork.

The Shape Builder tool can work pretty quick at manually trimming lines that are overshot past another path. Select the tool and hold down the Alt key (Windows) to see the minus sign next to the pointer. Drag it across a path segment going over and past another path to delete the overshoot. It can delete multiple overshot paths in a single drawing stroke. Astute Graphics' Dynamic Sketch plugin can do the same thing.

CAD artwork is usually pretty unfriendly to vector-based graphics applications since most of the artwork is just lots of open lines rather than closed paths. CAD is just a very different paradigm.

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sttk3

Legend

This may be achieved by converting the target objects to Live Paint and immediately Expanding them.

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f_8153Author

Participant

Nope. Doesn't work on these kinds of pictures I work with, only simple ones. This method just makes the file size bigger.

Kurt Gold

Community Expert

Well, the Live Paint approach does eliminate 2842 out of 4920 paths in your sample file. Not ideal, but pretty good.

It does fail with duplicates that are not 100 % congruent.

However, at the moment it is probably the most effective built-in technique to purge such drawings in Illustrator.

Of course, you may want to research into the reasons why the original applications create these garbage .svg files and how to possibly prevent it in the first place.

CarlosCanto

Community Expert

Can you show samples of what you need? share a file if possible please

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f_8153Author

Participant

The problem: https://jackforge.com/overlapping-lines-adobe-illustrator/

But in complex pics like:

Dark black overlapping line.

jduncan

Community Expert

Why not outline all strokes and unite everything into a single compound shape using the Pathfinder palette? This would only work with single-color designs, like the one in the blog post mentioned.

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