Split lines

[GrangerMorton]

Hi,
  I'm trying to get rid of the horizontal lines at the bottom of each of these shapes.They are simple single lines with strokes There are loads of them. Every time I use knife, scissors or eraser it closes the path again. There are no options in Pathfinder that work without closing the bottom ones and joining all the others.
I must be missing something, here. Not a problem if they're a tad shorter I can always move all the shortenes points at once.
Thanks
G

[Monika Gause]

Pathfinders, eraser and knife only work with closed paths and close everything on their own. The scissors tool should not do that.

Can you show us what they look like in the layers panel? Open the layers so we can see what they are: path, group, etc.

[GrangerMorton]

Hi Monika

thanks.... it's a compound path. I'll try the scissor tool again

G

[GrangerMorton]

The scissor tool works but I need to go back and delete the points added when it's cut. It's a good workaround but time consuming. I also wanted to be able to do it to cut the lines around a text block, (you can see where I've done that) and I can't blank it out with b/g colour as I need the vectors for a laser cutter to follow.

[Kurt Gold]

You may select just the upper parts of the path with the Direct Selection tool.

Then hit Cmd-X to cut them, hit the Delete key to delete the remaining lines, hit Cmd-F to paste in front.

Then make a compound path again, if required.

[GrangerMorton]

Oh.... that's good!