breki.github.io

personal knowledgebase

Project maintained by breki Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

Z - Zoom tool
- Holding space turns on Hand tool
- Holding SHIFT enables zooming in to a rectangle
- Left-click and dragging zooms in continuously
- Holding ALT switched to zoom out

Selection

V - Selection tool
A - Direct Selection tool
Shift+Ctrl+A - deselect everything
Q - Lasoo Tool - select objects by dragging around all or part of the object
you can use Selection and Direction tools and draw a rectangle marquee to select objects, but make sure you are NOT drawing the rectangle above an object (like map background)

Locking

Select objects and then press Ctrl+2 to lock them.a

Drawing

N - Pencil Tool for freehand drawing

Measuring

Ctrl+R - turns on rulers
To measure object properties: switch on Document Info panel, click on its settings and select Objects. Then it will show properties of selected objects.

Layers

Hiding Everything Except… - Select an object of the layer you want to work with and then run the Object -> Hide -> Other Layers menu command

Layout

Use workspaces - I created my own called Map making

Smoothing of paths

Found Script for Simplifying Paths, downloadable from GitHub. Place all .jsx files into the C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator CC 2018\Presets\en_US\Scripts directory (note this will change with new versions of Illustrator and I don’t know if it automatically copies user scripts to a new location).

Restart Illustrator, now you can find the scripts under the File Scripts menu item. I tried RemoveRedundantPoints.V1.8 and it seems to be working.

Scripting

Troubleshooting

Sometimes when a new Illustrator version arrives, it doesn’t properly update the scripting API and you get errors like

System.InvalidCastException: Unable to cast COM object of type 'System.__ComObject' 
to interface type 'Illustrator.Application'. 
This operation failed because the QueryInterface call on the COM component for the interface with IID
'{95CD20AA-AD72-11D3-B086-0010A4F5C335}' failed due to the following error: 
No such interface supported (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80004002 (E_NOINTERFACE)).

In this case, uninstall all versions of Illustrator, install the latest one, re-add Illustrator reference in the C# project, rebuild and try again.