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October 2020

New Trimmer tool for Cutting Tools

When working on the Extrude tool for AxoTools, it became obvious that users need a tool to quickly trim paths for hidden line removal. Of course, AxoTools has options for fills and excluding hidden lines when extruding, but that’s only one situation. That tool is now here as the Trimmer tool in the current version of Cutting Tools. Here’s how it works:

trimmer tool hidden line removal

With the Trimmer tool, simply click on a path or drag through several paths to delete a portion of it between intersections with other paths. If one direction doesn’t intersect, it removes the path to its end point.

Stacking Order added to ToolShed

Have you ever needed to change the stacking (drawing) order of objects and used menu commands like Object > Arrange > Bring Forward or dragged them up or down in the Layers panel? Every once in a while, the order you need corresponds to the objects’ position on the page. With the latest version of ToolShed (16.3.7), there’s a new feature in the menu Object > Stacking Order… that addresses that.

Your alignment choices are, obviously, listed in the dialog shown above. The default stacking is bottom-to-top, but the checkbox in the dialog changes that to top-to-bottom. As you work, it helps to keep in mind Illustrator’s coordinate system, which is by default that positive values grow to the right or down. This may be confusing when stacking by the bottom edge, which is again measured from the ruler’s origin, not from below.

I hope you’ll find this simple addition useful.

Illustrator 2021 compatible

The following plugins are now compatible with Adobe Illustrator 2021:

  • AxoTools
  • Cleanup Tool
  • Concatenate
  • Cutting Tools
  • Nudge Panel
  • Select Menu
  • Square Up
  • ToolShed

Other plugins may work as well. Just copy them into into the Plug-ins folder of Illustrator 2021. There’s no guarantee, but they probably will work. The first time you launch Illustrator with the older plugins present, you’ll see a dialog like this for each plugin:

Click the button “Yes, load it” to load the plugin. Illustrator will remember your choice, so you will not be asked again.

If you have trouble with an older plugin, simply remove it from Illustrator’s Plug-ins folder.

It’s an known issue that the panels may be larger than their contents. It’s easiest to fix this by setting the UI scaling to its smallest settings in Preferences > User Interface. More information in this post regarding UI issues in Windows may apply.

As always, please let me know if you encounter any problems with the plugins, or if you care to offer suggestions for improving them. I like feedback!