Yes you can. But in typical Illustrator fashion, the interface for the whole thing is utterly ridiculous. The resulting PDF is here. Open it and you'll find that the URL is just text (not an image) and is a functioning hyperlink. Select a text object that contains a URL. Object>Slice>Make. Object>Slice>SliceOptions. Slice Type: HTML Text. Turn on the Text is HTML checkbox. Note that the "Text Displayed in Cell" is not, in fact, the text displayed in the cell, but HTML code. Note that you can't edit the code. If you must do this kind of thing in Illustrator, look up Slices in the online Help for more info. If, as you say, you're not a web-head, but you want to see how easy building a perfectly sensible simple web page in a drawing program can be, download a demo of Xara Xtreme 5 Pro and try it out for a few days. JET ... View more

You haven't described the objects on the page or how they are presently arranged. Assuming the individual "numbers" are separate textFrame objects roughly arranged in a horizontal row: Open the Align palette. From its flyout menu, select Show Options. Select all the objects, then just click one of them. Align Palette: Enter .25 in in the Distribute Spacing field. Click the Horizontal Distribute Space button. JET ... View more

Nick, The kind of "filling" you describe (creating filled paths in the shape of areas that are merely visually enclosed by several separate paths) is generically known as "flood filling." Illustrator's treatment of a flood fill tool is its LivePaint feature, introduced in CS3. For instructions on how to use it, look it up in your Online Help. JET ... View more

...scale, shear/skew, rotate was the in-house mantra - especially when you could program keys to do the steps for you Sharon, Record these steps into three Actions, named IsoTop, IsoLeft, and IsoRight: JET ... View more

continued... Illustrator's Deficiencies re Technical Illustration: Illustrator is the only program among those listed above still lacking these very basic features: User-defined drawing scales. (!!) Connector lines. Reliable grid snaps. (!!) Live shape primitives (polygons and ellipses with adjustable geometric parameters after being created) (!!) A proper circular arc tool (!!) Illustrator (and FreeHand) also lacks: Simple dimension tools. Callout tools. (I dare say those would be in FreeHand by now, had Adobe not acquired and condemned it.) Illustrator does have a few very basic interface elements and a few advanced features which can be exploited for axonometric drawing: Line Tool: Its dialog alows you to define a path segment numerically in terms of angle and length. SmartGuides: Although inferior to similar features in competing programs, its construction guides can be set to your drawing axes. Move Dialog: DoubleClicking the main selection tools (white or black pointer) presents a dialog in which you can define a movement in terms of angle and direction. Actions: Illustrator's macro recording/playback feature. Can be marginally useful for initially "projecting" (rotating, scaling) flat ortho objects onto the main drawing planes. (This is largely why I asked about your background; beginners commonly think that is all there is to isometric drawing, and don't understand that isometric drawing means drawing directly onto the isometric planes, not "projecting" things drawn in the flat.) Javascripting Support: Can be hugely leveraged, but of course requires both a knowledge of Javascript and an understanding of axonometric construction and practice. Pattern Brushes: Can be used to store "adjustable" versions of repeating objects, such as fasteners or terminals. Suffers from some debilitating caveats that have to be worked-around (inability to disallow scaling of strokes and distortion of end tiles). IsoDraw is still focussed on its entirely too-vertical "engineering/enterprise" marketing orientation. It doesn't even list prices on its website, and even refuses to quote prices straightforwardly over the phone. The kind of programming required for 2D axonometric drawing stopped being "rocket science" decades ago. It's a pity, but If not corrected, I expect its antequated marketing model to lead to its eventual demise. This is a day and age in which quite powerful 3D modeling programs can be had for free. It's way past time for IsoDraw to go mainstream, or give up. That's the problem with 2D axonometric drawing these days: It's not that it isn't need; it still very much is. It's still as practical as ever. The pity is, since the beginning of the whole personal-computer "revolution" of the early 80s, technical illustration in the US seems to me to have slided continually backward. Most of what passes for product documentation these days is hideous. The infrequent occasions you see attempts at axonometric illustration for parts breakdowns or assembly instructions, they are either replete with drawing error or consist of some painfully ugly flattened view from a 3D CAD/CAE model. In today's computer-on-every-table world, common technical illustration has regressed, not advanced. I started out with board, t-square, & triangle and adapted what I knew to the "new" software... EXCELLENT. Because that's what you'll have to do, to varying degrees, with any of the above-mentioned programs. You can do proper axonometric drawing in any of the mainstream, general-purpose vector drawing programs, and you can even do it with reasonable efficiency. But doing so is a continual process of "clever" working-around the X,Y page-edge orientation that--with few exceptions--permeates every feature of the program. It's far more important to understand the principles of axonometric drawing in general (which you probably do, despite what you think you've forgotten). With that background, you can figure out how to exploit the features that are provided in the program you end up using, and devise the inevitable workarounds. I'm really not sure I can answer your questions about the isometric protractor... It's important. Did you not, back in the day, use a plastic isometric template or mylar underlay that consisted of a large isometric ellipse marked off in rotational degrees? Or (better still) did you construct a rotation about one of the isometric axes by projecting from a cirle? For example, if the thrustline of a cylinder was not parallel to your X, Y, or Z axis, how did you determine its correctly proportioned length? I know the difference between an iso projection and an iso drawing... EXCELLENT. You understand, then, that you must either: Use true measure for the major axes of ellipses and foreshortened measure along the axes (isometric projection). Or... Use true measure along the axes and enlarged ellipses (isometric drawing). If your experience parallels mine, you'll find that, when devising a consistent method in these kinds of general-purpose drawing programs, it turns out that using the first method is more efficient than the second, overall. This is probably opposite of what you did on the board, but I find that, in practice, the software lessens the tedium of scaling along the axes more than it accomodates the otherwise-necessary up-scaling of ellipses. ...vaguely remember using the scale, shear, and rotation tools alot. Most of the piecemeal instruction you'll find for isometric "tricks" in programs like Illustrator focusses too heavily upon skewing. I consider it one of the dead givaways that the author doesn't really have much axonometric drawing experience. It's part of that "beginner's misconception" I aluded to: As an experienced isometric illustrator, you know that you don't usually draw "in the flat" and then distort it to your iso axes; you draw along your drawing's axes to begin with. In the methods that I've devised, I've found that I almost never resort to skewing. Skewing reqires too many moves, because the skew does not simultaneously scale. Rotating, followed by scaling in one direction, fits the lengths of both axes at once. Oh - and being able to measure lines as I drew them - or was that in ISODraw? Probably IsoDraw, if you're otherwise thinking only of Illustrator. The dialog of Illustrator's Line Tool lets you define a single-segment path in terms of angle and length; but unlike other programs, Illustrator's lame Info Palette does not display length/angle as you drag with with the Line Tool. The Info Palette does provide live distance/angle feedback when you drag with the Measure Tool, but that, of course, doesn't create a path. (It's another example of the very poor feature integration and resulting over-complication-to-no-benefit of this program that I'm always raving about.) Unlike Draw and Designer, Illustrator's SmartGuides feature does not provide distance increment snaps for its angled construction guides. Illustrator's grid feature is limited to square increments; it doesn't provide for defining angled grids. (Turning on Snap To Grid disables SmartGuides anyway.) You can resort to drawing a grid with the Grid Tool and then turning that into pathGuides, or locking it. But in practice, I find it just as efficient (meaning just as inefficient) to rely on the LineTool dialog to establish measures along axes. A one-click Action button can then scale the resulting line to 81.64% (cosine of the iso angle). Once you have the line, you can just drag it about to use it elsewhere as a "measuring stick" when you need to. I'm not one for memorizing too much esoterica, probably being discouraged by all of Illustrator's too-numerous keyboard shortcuts. But it's hugely beneficial to memorize a few key measures for isometric drawing: 30, 150, 270 degrees (Angles of iso axes.) 120 degrees (Separation angle between iso axes.) 35.27 (Iso angle--the "tilt" of the isometric cube--as decimal, rather than degrees/seconds; for entering in calc fields.) 57.74 (Sine of iso angle, as percentage; therefore the vertical scale factor of a circle on top plane of the iso cube.) 81.64 (Cosine of iso angle, as percentage; therefore the scale factor of the front corner edge of the iso cube; therefore the foreshortened measuring scale along all three iso axes.) .5 (Sine of 30 degrees; therefore the scale factor for the "rise" of any length along the left and right iso axes [which I call Z and X, respectively]; therefore the half-diagonal of an iso square. It's easy to remember, and sometimes comes in handy). ...but I was really hoping for info already printed that I could work with and not have to "re-invent" the wheel so to speak. I have yet to see a book or other resource that does an adequately thorough job of explaining axonomentric constuction in the context of Illustrator and similar programs. I have a couple of excellent pre-computer texts on isometric drawing (you may also), but they, of course, don't put things in the software context, don't leverage the few, but significant advantages the software provides, and are generally written in "textbook styles" that make a relatively subject sound more complicated than it is. Still, for someone with your background, an old textbook may be all you need to refresh your memory; you may find one on Amazon. Once you refresh your memory of the principles, you can most likely recongnize how they can be deployed as you learn the features of whatever drawing software you are using. Which is why I asked in my OP if anyone knew if the Illustrator CS4 WOW Book contained the Chapter on Isometric systems someone in another thread said was in the CS3 WOW Book. I've only momentarily thumbed through earlier editions of that book in the bookstore, so am only somewhat familiar with it. As I recall, it's focus is general; a collection of effects and tricks. I'll make a point to take a look at the chapter mentioned next time I have opportunity. It's probably a fine book, so don't take this as a slur; but since axonometric drawing is not the main subject, (though I'd love to discover otherwise) I rather expect a few basic tricks with grids and skew/rotate/scale transforms like those mentioned elsewhere in this thread. That kind of stuff can be found online. I'm desperatly searching for work but full time technical illustrator jobs that don't require knowledge of CAD are few and far between. By way of encouragement, I don't really think so. Most every company that builds a product needs to be able to support it with proper end-user-oriented technical documentation. That's everything from parts explosions for carburetors to step-by-step instructions for Lego kits. Both can be done with ordinary 2D mainstream drawing programs, and without any CAD software experience whatsoever. What's commonly missing is the understanding of axonometric drawing itself--which you already posess. I work in this field, managing a department which produces end-use technical documents. What I find is that almost all applicants with working knowledge of mainstream publishing software have no clue about technical drawing; many downright fear it. It's that drawing software cultural thing, stemming from the nearly utter disregard of axonometric drawing in the software marketing. Nor would I have you be intimidated by CAD software. Using it is not rocket science either. (Doing true mechanical engineering work is another thing altogether. The CAD software is just a tool. Remember, an engineering department uses Word and Excel, too; just because CAD software resides in an engineering department doesn't mean it's unapproachable. I don't know didly about accounting, but I can work Excel. Heck, if you can sort out the convoluted, confused, and scattered interface of Illustrator, with all its tedious workarounds and behavioral caveats, you can learn a CAD program; at least they're organized for efficiency.) Also, truth be told, many companies that have a group using Illustrator or something similar to produce illustrations for parts breakdowns or service manuals or whatever, seldom really use it for original illustration; they use Illustrator to "clean up" CAD exports of 3D models flattened to 2D views and exprorted as DXFs. The so-called "illustrators" are just removing extraneous internal notes, hidden lines, etc., etc. and otherwise prepping the result for import to a page layout program or some such. Someone with actual experience doing axonometric drawings from scratch can bring alot of new capability to the table in such an environment, and can thereby improve the output quality and versatility of the whole group. So by all means, don't toss out that drawn-on-the-board and drawn-in-IsoDraw portfolio, and don't hesitate to take it with you on interviews. Also, have you considered freelancing? Self-employment certainly has its upside and downside, but many, many small-to-medium manufacturing and fabrication concerns have absolutely no internal staffpower (let alone expertise) for product documentation, and love to have a reliable outsource for such. So I'm trying to get back up to speed as quickly as possible for the jobs that are available. If that makes since. While Illustrator has always been my program of choice (with ISODraw tying for first) I'm willing to learn any vector program that will get me a full time job. Real-world story: I grew up in, and still live near, an "Air Force base town." That town has a plethora of so-called "technical illustration" houses doing contract work for the base. The people who work in those shops rather optimistically call themselves "technical illustrators." They're not paid much. Know what they do, all day, every day? They open scans of axonometric line drawings in Photoshop and touch up unwanted trash pixels. No kidding. Imagine what someone who actually knows something about axonometric illustration might bring to that kind of organization. So I'm just saying; don't sell yourself short just because you don't know Illustrator or some CAD program like the back of your hand (yet). > So - any help you can give will be greatly appreciated... Sharon, you and your subject made my day. (And I'm on vacation.) Again, sorry for "pontificating." It's just one of my favorite subjects. JET ... View more

Sharon, Very nice to meet you. Yep. Your work is right up my alley. We'll probably speak the same language. Sorry for the delay. I wanted to reply at length. (So I apologize in advance for the length. Will probably take two or three posts.) First, you're certainly not violating any rules by posting a link to some examples of your work. (It would be great if other newcomers who come here for help were as forthcoming about their experience. Helps tremendously in knowing how--or if--to respond.) ...and find I only vaguely recall how I drew my iso illustrations....Talk about embaressed....I'm searching for anything that can help me "remember" how I did things. Not to worry. Contrary to common misconception, we "over 40s" don't forget stuff just because we're over 40. We forget stuff because we've done and still do so many different things our brains (not to mention our bosses) "re-prioritize" on-the-fly all the time. De-prioritized stuff just has to be dusted off. It'll all come back to you quickly. Up until about 8 years ago I would have considered myself an expert in Illustrator and almost expert in ISODraw....I'm experamenting with Illustrator CS4 now... Good. Then I'll consider you open-minded about drawing software. ...the software has evolved so much... It really hasn't; not in the areas affecting axonometric drawing. I'm speaking generally here about mainstream drawing programs like Illustrator, not Illustrator alone: It's my eternal frustration that the basic drawing features are just as primitive as they were in the beginning in the mid-to-late 80s. By far, most of the developement has gone toward what I call eye-candy and "paper doily" features--artsy effects and instant-gratification one-click toys that generate complex and too-often inefficient structures. All the while, practical and clean geometric drawing improvement and sophistication has gone unattended, with just a handful of exceptions. This has led to a ridiculous state of affairs for mainstream vector drawing programs, all of which should consider full exploitation of geometric accuracy and full-featuredness in an efficient and intuitive interface their foundation--since that's fundamentally what vector drawing with Bezier paths is all about. Sadly, in the Illustrator community especially, you'll find a downright aversion (almost a fear) to anything remotely smacking of even moderately deliberate geometric drawing construction. (Even though Illustrator is used everywhere for techish commercial illustration.) AI-only users will even typically reply to you "It's not for technical illustration! Use a CAD program!" That blinders-wearing mindset is not nearly so prominate in the Corel Draw, FreeHand, and Canvas communities, even though all these four programs do, for most practical purposes, the same things. A quick run-down of the traditional direct-competitors in Illustrator's general category re techish commercial illustration. (All of these programs can otherwise be used for most everything Illustrator is used for.): FreeHand was for two decades Illustrator's primary mindshare competitor and functional superior. It was recently acquired by Adobe and killed. It has the best-of-class interface for basic Bezier path drawing and manipulation, and several pertenant geometric advantages, one key of which is a proper ellipse tool that does double-duty for arcs with user-defined start/end points. That tool can be exploited as an axonometric protractor. Canvas is expressly marketed toward technical/commercial illustration. It's basic Bezier drawing and manipulation interface is closest to FreeHand's among those listed here; not as elegant as FreeHand's but close to it in efficiency. Includes more "CADish" treatment of some of its tools. For example, provides several tool variants to define ellipses and arcs, a proper fillet/chamfer command, etc. Greater mathematical accuracy. Even an object database feature. Understand: Despite Canvas's open inclusion of technical illustrators among the general vector drawing user base (duh!), all of Canvas's considerably more complete feature set is basic, straightforward, stuff that should be germane to all vector drawing apps. Unfortunately, it is also all oriented toward ordinary X,Y orthographic drawing (as is everything in Illustrator, FreeHand, and CorelDraw). But because at least the geometric controls and accuracy are there, they can be manipulated to serve for axonometric construction. Canvas's interactive guides feature is better than Illustrator's SmartGuides. CorelDraw's feature set (and community) also reflects a recognition of technical-commercial illustration as among the general-purpose vector population, although its "technically" (read "basic geometry")-oriented features treatment is somewhere between that of Illustrator's and Canvas's. Draw's Dynamic Guides feature is superior to Illustrator's SmartGuides, and includes snap increments (!) along its angled construction guides. Corel long ago acquired Micrografix Designer, and recently merged it with Draw's interface. The result was Corel Designer 12, which feels like a "version of Draw" that is specifically oriented toward technical design and drawing. It includes an actual interface for axonometric construction, which I consider a very nobel treatment despite its stopping short of full-featuredness. (You still have to construct your own workarounds for off-axis simple and compound rotations.) It's a very refreshing program to my mind, demonstrating that mainstream vector drawing interfaces could easily become "taken more seriously" by loosing their "fear" of everything remotely "technical." Designer has been upgraded to current Corel version X4, and includes an array of CAD/CAE model improrts (and offers additional ones, like CATIA, as additional-purchase options). So essentially, you can do with Corel Designer anything you can do with Draw (which for all practical purposes means anything you can do with Illustrator, FreeHand, Canvas), plus gain an actual, expressed, intentional, believe-it-or-not (!) accommodation for at least basic axonometric construction. Designer thereby represents to my mind the first occurrance of a mainstream so-called "illustration" program having ever escaped its tyrannial orientation of every feature toward the dumb X,Y edges of its page edges. (Which is why I have long argued that all Illustrator-like programs are not illustration programs at all; they are mere graphic design programs which illustrators continually conjole into illustration purposes, for lack of the long-overdue something better.) You mention looking for new employment: If I were looking to help establish a company's struggling effort to find an affordable and easily-trainable connection between internal working drawings/models and published technical illustration, from a purely functional standpoint I would choose Corel Designer among those above and Illustrator. Its role could be much like that of IsoDraw's at a fraction of the cost. The ugly truth is, Illustrator is too predominate in the general vector design marketplace, simply as a result of Adobe's mindshare in the graphics world. So its innovation-choking dominance becomes a self-fullfilling prophecy, as people continue to default to it as "the safe bet." Better programs struggle as a result of the fear-to-be-different and fear-to-learn-something-new among the existing user base. So if you're walking into a shop with an already-established workflow, you'll more likely find Illustrator than the others. But since you've got considerable experience in Illustrator, you should not balk at the prospect of lateraling that experience to another that you find more amenable to axo drawing. Your real asset here is your experience in isometric drawing. JET continues... ... View more

A man (well, woman, I guess) after my own heart! I happen to be working on material to explain correct isometric construction in mainstream vector drawing programs. (Presently am working on a Javascript-based tool that will take the toil out of simple and compound rotations, among other things.) What would you like to know first? 😉 I assume that you already understand isometric construction as done on the board? If so, how long, and mainly what kind of subject matter (furniture, automotive, aviation)? Do you know how to construct simple and compound rotations with an isometric protractor? Do you understand the geometric principles of why isometric works? (Ex: The geometric significance of the iso angle 35'16"?) Have you ever constructed dimetric or trimetric drawings? What is your experience (beginner, intermediate, expert) with Illustrator? Are you married to Illustrator for this purpose? JET ... View more

Dave stated he is using CS3. I've read every word in the CS3 Javascript Tools document pertaining to modeless palettes and have yet to make it work. The only times I can get a modeless palette in Illustrator CS3 to remain visible long enough to view it is when I include in its script a statement that interrupts it, like an alert() or the $.sleep() statement as in sonic's post--which, of course, debilitates the palette. Are you saying that you know for sure that modeless palettes do work correctly in CS4? If so, can you please post a simple, but complete, script that does that? JET ... View more

Use  ScriptUI to create a window and add an image to it: I cannot get Illustrator CS3 to show and hold a modeless palette window. The window opens and immediately disappears. A modal dialog works, but not a modeless palette. From the ScriptUI documentation: What specific document are you referring to? JET ... View more

Are there recommended guidelines or rules of thumb that I should follow? Yes. Since before the beginning of PostScript, the rule-of-thumb for commerical offset lithography for digital continuous-tone images is ONE-TO-TWO TIMES THE HALFTONE SCREEN RULING. It is NOT the widspread misconception of a blanket "300 ppi for anything in print." Yes, there are esoteric details which some will trot out to unnecssarily obfuscate the issue. But if you understand the basic purpose of the rule-of-thumb, its principle becomes common-sense: The purpose of a minimum ppi is to eliminate visible "pixelation," often called "the jaggies." The operative word here is visible. Now try this mental exercise: You have one round object (a halftone dot). Use it to render for me a square. That's right; you can't. If the number of pixels in the image is at least equal to the number of halftone dots with which it will be rendered, there is no way you are going to see the square shapes of individual pixels. The rule-of-thumb adds some "leeway" to allow for on-page scaling (which is not best-practice anyway). Over the years, too many people, who either forgot about or never understood the basic principle in the first place, corrupted the rule-of-thumb to the unthinking, too-often bantered "everything has to be 300 ppi" misconception. People go around saying this without even mentioning the factor required for a number: the halftone ruling! That's a dead givaway that they don't really understand the principle they go around spouting their "expert" advice about. They get this "300 ppi minimum" from the assumption that the halftone ruling is the common magazine-quality ruling of 150 lines per inch (an assumption you should never make). They then think, "well, if the rule is 150-to-300, best quality must be 300." That's like reading the maximum inflation pressure marked on your tires and calling it optimum. It's like Microsoft assuming that if two mouse buttons are good, then 12 must be great! Look at the rule-of-thumb again. It is a RANGE. It's a range from acceptable on one end (undersampled) to acceptable on the other end (oversampled). What does common sense tell you is optimum within that range? I typically try to stick with a minimum resolution of 200  (preferably 300 or more) dpi for print items. You should now understand my asking this question: Upon what criteria have you been basing your own rule-of-thumb? By what principle and in what circumstance do you consider "300 ppi or more" preferable? I'm working on some 18x24 posters and will be doing some even larger-format display pieces in the coming weeks. It should now be clear that asking a question about raster resolution is nonsense unless you provide some basic information about the printing method for which the documents are being prepared. What is the repro method? (Litho offset? One-off inkjet printing?) What will be the screening method? (Traditional halftone? Stochastic screening?) What about the images themselves? (Line art? Continuous tone?) Trying to provide "expert" answers without raising those questions is just as nonsensical, and throws doubt upon the credibilty of the "expert." JET ... View more

Sanat, Even if a color is Spot, it still has to have CMYK or RGB values (depending on the color mode of the document) to tell Illustrator what color to display it as. Beyond that, though, you're going to run into another problem anyway: Any Swatch that is defined as Global is going to be counted as a Spot Color. (I've been complaining about this for years.) For example: var docRef=app.activeDocument; var count=docRef.spots.length; alert(count); for(i=0;i<count;i++){ alert(docRef.spots.name); } Run that in a CMYK document in which you have removed all unused palette items. You'll find that it returns [Registration] as a spot color, just because it's set to Global. Now doubleClick the Black Swatch. Set it to Global (but not Spot). The sript will tell you there are two Spot colors. JET ... View more

You don't need a script for this. An Action would do. I assume you want to apply the Trim Pathfinder from the Pathfinder palette, not the Trim Pathfinder Effect from the Effects menu. (There is no Pathfilters menu.) Also, unless something has changed dramatically in the CS4 version of AI's Javascript model, there is no provision for invoking Pathfinder operations. JET ... View more

Antknee, Please describe more fully the nature of the grapics you intend to use. (Color mode, color depth. How color-critical are the images?) Also, how you intend this book to be printed/published? (Mass produced in large quantities on a web offset press? On-demand printed in short runs in an as-needed basis? Short run on digital press?) Have you fully explored the possibility of simply publishing from FileMaker alone? Unless dead-accurate color is an absolute necessity, with digital presses and on-demand printing services, it is entirely feasible to use FMP to: Author the content, maintain and work with the database. Create a standalone runtime application with full database functionality. Publish to web using FileMaker Server's IWP or PHP Assistant. Script exporting to print-ready PDFs, based on Layouts set up specifically for the format of the printed book. I routinely publish illustrated parts catalogs of 600-1000 pages in length, directly from PDFs exported from FileMaker Pro. In my case, the images are grayscale or 1-bit PNGs, but assuming RGB is acceptable in your print workflow, they could just as easily be color. Working this way, the print versions are always at parity with the database; I can export new print files anytime I want. Regarding AI or InD, though, you'll find InD's XML support more amenable and less tedious than AI's. Also, you may be able to simply use InD's DataMerge feature, importing ordinary tab-delimited data (depends on the nature of the content), which is something AI can't do. An AI file is also limited to 100 Artboards (pages). JET ... View more

Oh no, the darn facts! who needs paranoia when we have the darn facts? Can you ask Your PM why Adobe refuses to provide updates? Thank you! Jacob, Will you please do as Skullmaker (yes, his mother actually named him that) requests, and ask your Personal Message why Adobe refuses to provide updates? Remember, customer service is job one at Adobe. And we have people watching you. [Pssst...Doug, Corel pays me twice as much as Adobe. Pass it on....] JET ... View more

I tried the eraser but frankly am struggling to see the point of that one. I was interrupted while typing my previous post and did not finish the paragraph about the Eraser: The Eraser should be the closest for your need, but it always cuts a swath, not a zero-width cut, and it unpredictably distorts the remaining segments. If your artwork is such that the resulting distortions do not wreck it, that would be the simplest method that AI provides. Work on a copy of the file. Collect all the artwork in a Layer. Duplicate that Layer. Draw guides where you want the cuts to be. Eraser: Press and hold Alt (constrains Eraser to rectangular marquee), and drag around the entire half of the map you do not want, snapping to the guide. Repeat steps 4 & 5  on the other Layer, erasing the opposite half of the artwork. Again, check the remaining artwork for distortions caused by the Eraser. JET ... View more

I have a largish illustrator image on multiple layers. By "Illustrator image", I'm going to assume you're not talking about a raster image, but about a typical illustration composed of many vector paths, some closed, some open, some filled, some not filled. In essence I want to cut it cleanly into 3 peices for different files. Is there an easy way to do this? Not in Illustrator, because Illustrator has never had and still does not have a decent tool for cutting its own artwork. It now has no less than THREE separate cutting tools and they are all pure junk compared to common functions in other drawing programs: The Scissor requires you to tedously cut one path at a time. The Knife does provide a keyboard shortcut to constrain it to straight cuts; but it stupidly fails to cut unfilled open paths. The Eraser should be the closest for your need, but it always cuts a swath, not a zero-width cut, and it unpredictably distorts the remaining segments. If your artwork is such that the resulting distortions do not wreck it, that would be the simplest method that AI provides. Work on a copy of the file. Collect all the artwork in a Layer. Duplicate that Layer. Draw guides I could do masks for three areas I suppose… That long ago became the Illustrator-user default workaround, because of the program's lack of such a no-brainer standard feature as a straighforward cutting tool. It has so long been resorted to by AI users, that most of them have forgotten that it is, in fact, a workaround. but the image is very large and its a bit of a waste. Yep. Understand. Illustrator is full of inefficient habits, due to its functional limitations. Ideally I want to keep the vectors so photoshop might not help. Rasterization: The other workaround too often resorted to. You don't say what version. ALWAYS state what version you are using. Another workaround is using page tiling (CS3) or artboards (CS4) to export PDF pages that effectively "split" your artwork. But that also fails to actually cut objects which cross the trims, and masks the outboard portions. (Less wasteful than containing and masking objects that are entirely outside the trim, but still nothing anyone would call tidy.) JET ... View more

1. Text Tool. Click (don't drag) to create a PointType object. Type some text. 2. Click the black pointer. (The text object needs to be selected as an object, and not be in text editing mode.) 3. Appearance Palette flyout menu: Add New Fill. Apply a different color to the added fill. 4. Appearance Palette: Drag the added fill to below the Characters listing. Leave the added fill highlighted. 5. Effect>ConvertToShape>Rectangle. The Shape Options dialog opens. Turn on its Preview checkbox. Its settings are fairly self-explanatory. JET ... View more

Adobe InDesign: Adobe InDesign also cannot auto-fit textframes to their content. JET ... View more

The basic question is a simple yes or no. No, the question is a question. 'Yes' or 'no' are answers. The answer to your question is basically 'no'. But it's not that simple, no matter how you try to limit it. Illustrator cannot simply and direcly vertically center the content of an AreaType textframe the way most programs with decent text handling do. But (as with so many other things) it provides a ridiculously unintuitive workaround: You use Add New Fill or Add New Stroke in the Appearance Palette, move it below the Characters listing, and then apply the Convert To Shape Effect to that added Stroke or Fill. This works with either AreaType or PointType objects, but is more practical with PointType. (It is otherwise pointless to discuss vertically centering text in a PointType object, since PointType objects, by definition, have no frames in which to center.) Now, aren't you glad I didn't just say "No"? JET ... View more

So-called Paste Inside in FreeHand and Clipping Mask in Illustrator are really the same constructs: Clipping paths. Their interface is just different (with FreeHand's being far better.) You don't say what version Illustrator you are using. Up until CS4, Illustrator's clipping paths stupidly displayed all the outlines of their contents when selected, and their dimensions (and therefore alignment, etc.) were based on those of the whole contents, not on the bounds of the clipping paths (extraordinarily cumbersome). When you apply a clipping path in Illustrator, it removes the fills and strokes of the path used as the clipping path, whereas FreeHand leaves them alone. So in Illustrator, you have to tediously "direct select" (white pointer) the clipping path in order to re-apply desired fills / strokes. Illustrator's sloppy interface allows you to go through all the motions apply multiple strokes and/or fills to a direct-selected clipping path--and then fails to display them unless you release the clipping path. (It does similar things in many other areas.) When selected, Illustrator's interface stupidly calls a Clipping Mask a Group in the Appearance Palette (as it does with other constructs). The UnGroup command, however, is unavailable. Yet the constructs created by the Flare Tool is given its own object name, even though it comes a whole lot closer to being an ordinary Group than does a clipping path. Hideous interface. Slopiness, inconsistency, inefficiency abounds. That's why it's so indecipherable to newcomers. JET ... View more

If you don't use InDesign, or if the numbers need to be more graphically embellished than is possible in InDesign, you might take a look at a couple of the AI Javascripts described here. The SerialNumbers script populates a selected textFrame with a sequential list of paragraph-delimited numbers with or without a prefix: The NumberedCallouts script creates additional sequentially-numbered individual textframes, styled like the original: To semi-automate production of a set of highly-stylized sequentially-numbered text objects, the SerialNumbers script can be used in conjunction with the TextVariablesFTROU script described here to create Variables Palette DataSets that can then be batch printed or exported. JET ... View more

Ms. Asphalt, please bare with me Thanks for the invitation, but never on the first date. I am wanting this shape to wrap around a logo You can't actually have one object wrap around another. That will require two objects situated to look like one. That can either be done by building what looks like a continuous band as two pieces, as explicitly demonstrated in Post 2; or by making whatever the band "wraps around" in two pieces. Where I am having trouble is getting the corners to bend around without loosing the color. Since you have now added to your original criteria that you want the band to "wrap around" something, that's really not an issue. Build your band as two halves. One is twisted, the other isn't. (Your choice as to which one is in front of whatever is being wrapped around.) To do that, refer to the instructions in Post 2 for Method 2: Make two copies of the original artwork. On one of the copies, perform the exact steps shown, down through Step 6. On the other, do the same thing, except insert these additional steps after Step 3: 3A. White Pointer: Drag a rectanular marquee selection around the left pair of Mesh Points. 3B. DoubleClick the Reflect Tool. Axis: Horizontal. Click Okay. (Now you have two half bands; one twisted, one not.) Then proceed with Steps 4-6. (Now you have two half-bands, both bent. One twisted, one not.) Then deselect. Then... 7. Black Pointer: Select the whole twisted half. DoubleClick the Reflect Tool. Axis: Vertical. Click OK. (Now you have two half-bands, one twisted, one not, one reflected, so the two together can form the appearance of a figure-eight with a twist. 8. Align the two halves of the band. Use Send To Front or Send To Back to stack the object being wrapped between the "rear" and "front" halves of the band. JET ... View more

Isolder, (Is that "Is Older", or "I Solder"?) You should have just stayed in this thread. It wasn't "hijacked." The discussion is still very much in line with the subject. Plus, the thread originator seems to have lost interested a while ago. There are no clipping masks or other unnecessary complications. See step 1 in post 8? That's a single PointType object, set in a monospace font with increased Range Tracking to space characters one per "frame" of the filmstrip (which is a Symbol). The frames which have no characters in them have space characters. Those two objects (the Symbol and the text object) are both included in the Envelope. The Envelope is on a Layer by itself. After the work with the Envelope was completed, I: Duplicate the layer. Object>EnvelopeDistort>Edit Contents. Text Tool: Edit the text to delete a space before the word, add a space after the word. Repeat steps 1-3 until the text arrives at the left end of the text object. After that, step 3 becomes: Cut the leftmost character. Paste it at the right end of the text string (after the rightmost space). Repeat that process, watching the progress of the characters as I go. If you built the Mobius Envelope correctly, you'll see that when a character reaches the "seam" of the Mobius strip, it inverts. But the strip, of course, is supposed to be seamless. So by the time the first character jumps the seam, it becomes obvious that a few preceeding characters should also be inverted. When the character becomes visible in a frame in which it should invert but doesn't, I select the character and rotate it 180° in the Character Palette. (Yes, I cheated. Watch closely and you'll see that the character is merely rotated, not mirrored vertically. But at the 1/12 second frame rate, no one notices.) Add a Drop shadow. Save that as a Symbol. Put it on the bottom-most layer. In the SWF export dialog, export Layers to SWF frames, selecting the shadow layer as a static background. JET ... View more

Ahh I did it: Well, not quite... When something travels around a Mobius strip, it becomes inverted as it passes to the "other side of the single surface". So if your Mobius envelope is built right, you should see that occur; every other trip around, the characters should be upside-down. We could assume that your film strip is opaque. But in that case, every-other orbit of the text would not show. Build a Mobius strip from a strip of paper. Write text on it and you'll see what I mean. JET ... View more

Try hitting the refresh button. I don't know why that happens in this cumbersome forum. It didn't happen in the previous forum. JET ... View more

MöbiusEnvelopeMovie.swf JET ... View more

I am not asking you to do it for me,but... ...but then you ask me to do it for you. Sorry. No can do. I'm working on my boat today. And besides, I...um...I have a bone in my leg. Buy you a beer one day in the never never? I hope that's not your shop rate. (It sure isn't mine.) BTW, am not an AI expert... Never will be if you don't get your hands dirty. I think the instructions are pretty thorough. JET ... View more

More explicit instructions for the Möbius distortion: JET ... View more

You are being very cryptic, so I don't really understand your questions. You seem to be asking basic questions about using Illusrrator that really have nothing to do with the subject of this thread or my post. I'll give it my best shot: 1/ Film strip original is six frames... Your file contains nothing but a single Symbol Instance, which in turn contains a single Symbol Instance. The Symbol contains just some white filled rectangles and a black filled rectangle, arranged to look like six frames of a film strip. transform to 18 (6 x3). Expand and group... You use Transform Effect to create two copies? You then expand the Effect and Group the results? (The results would already be grouped.) (Please speak in complete sentences, so I don't have to guess what you are talking about.) Cannot now justchoose the outline / background. (attaching the original film strip using the solid one). The problem is that you now want to select the black rectangles and merge them into one? If so, you can't select the black rectangles because they are still elements contained inside a Symbol Instance. You either have to Break Link To Symbol, or Edit Symbol. See online Help for Symbols. 2/ Text: Has to be entered character by character and then aligned to each frame Now you want to add some text so that its characters appear to be in the frames, as in my earlier example? Just create a text object, type, and position it as desired. You can either include it in your Symbol, or you can create it as a separate object and include it when you apply the Envelope. See online Help for editing Symbols and applying Envelopes. 3/ How do you enter the text and line it up? How do you line up the text object with the filmstrip artwork? Just position it as desired. You can either create individual text objects for each frame, or, if there's a monospaced font that suits you, use that and increase the Tracking. See online Help for text range Tracking. 4/ Change the frame background colour etc... Again, your artwork is contained in a Symbol. You can colorize the Symbol Instance with the Symbol Stainer; or you can edit the Symbol. See online help for editing Symbols and Symbolism Tools. Basically it works fine up to the time you want to make changes... to text or background colours of frames... What works fine? The Envelope Distortion? To edit the content of an Envelope without releasing the Envelope, use Object>EnvelopeDistort>EditContents. See online Help for Envelopes. Wonder if you are getting my scenario? Not really, no. I will folow this post with more explicit instructions for the Möbius strip distortion. JET ... View more