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Cutting Tools CC now available

What’s your least favorite tool in Adobe Illustrator? Don’t get me wrong, Illustrator is an amazing piece of software, but with so many great features, something’s bound to be, um, less great. For me, that bit of mediocrity is the Scissors tool. Without a doubt, it performs a very necessary function, but I long wished I could get around the error message “Please use the scissors tool on a segment or anchor point (but not an endpoint) of a path.” It’s possible, of course, to dismiss the dialog and choose not see it again, but the finicky behavior is still there, making it a hassle to trim stacked or intersecting paths.

In 2001 I finished the first version of Cutting Tools, beginning with the Hatchet tool, designed not to throw up its hands and abandon the job site if the top path at that location happens to be an endpoint. There’s often another path under there, or maybe several, which I’d like to slice through in one fell “thwack!” Next I added the Table Saw and Saber Saw, which accommodated even more path destruction in one gesture. Once I had amassed a collection of leftover paths to clear away, either extreme laziness or a desire for efficiency inspired a quick-delete tool. I soon added a shortcut from the Hatchet so I could sever and sweep in one move of the stylus. Early versions of the Vector Vac animated the vectors spinning and shrinking as they got pulled into the vacuum. At first the effect was fun, but it soon just seemed silly.

Although it was the first of my plugins to rewrite for CS6 and CC, Cutting Tools’ multiple iterators and mutable arrays took a little time to tame, but the plugin is now updated and ready to be cut loose. I hope you find it useful. The plugin comes pre-loaded with a thousand trial uses for your evaluation. Really, 1,000! You may never want to run [Illustrator] with scissors again.

Download Cutting Tools

(Still half off with the coupon code PRERELEASE50)

Nudge CC now available

How often have you placed a pattern into a path, but needed to align the pattern with other art, but without moving the path? With a little guesswork and patience, it can be done, but there ought to be a simpler, more straightforward way. And there is!

Nudge panel pluginWhen I draw a floor plan and  place a pattern of a grid drawn at a given architectural scale behind it, I want the upper-left corner to align with the grid. How useful would a grid be, really, if it were simply plopped randomly behind the art? To use the plugin, I select the path with the pattern fill and click on one of the eight directional triangles to move the pattern left, right, up, down, or diagonally by one point. If I press the Command/Control key, the movement is divided in half, or the Option/Alt key will divide the moment by four. On a Mac, pressing the Control key while clicking will divide the distance by eight, and holding combinations of these keys will combine the effects so that I can make adjustments of 1/64 of a point. Pressing the shift key, too, will make each key work as a multiplier to move the pattern farther with each click.

Have you ever drawn a dashed line diverging from another? With the Dashes adjustments, you can precisely slide the dashes on a path forward or back along a path to align them as needed.

With the CC release, you can also select art objects and move them in small increments. I find this helpful for things like fine-tuning the placement of city names on maps or other situations where snapping isn’t helpful.

After working with pattern adjustments I found that patterns from existing art may have been scaled, rotated, or sheared, and to regain control of the pattern, there’s an Untransform button. Besides restoring a pattern to its original proportions, it also works on images (making them easy to export with the highest quality possible) and on other placed images such as EPS.

Please feel free to download it and try it out. In demo mode, you can take your time because the trial period doesn’t expire, but is instead based on a thousand test clicks. I’m sure you’ll find it a useful addition to your Illustrator workflow. As always I welcome your comments, questions, or suggestions.

50% off for early adopters extended to May 31

I know from the regular emails I get that a lot of people have been eagerly anticipating the next generation of my Graffix plugins for Adobe Illustrator. Concatenate is already available, Cutting Tools is literally days away, and the others will be following quickly. In the meantime, “early adopters” can get a 50% discount by entering the coupon code PRERELEASE50 when you check out. If you’re the type who wants all of the plugins, the Productivity Pack may be a good fit for you. At first, you may not see a significant savings, but there are more plugins coming and they will be added to your Productivity Pack purchase when they arrive, probably early this summer, even if it’s months after the sale.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll advise that the Proof Block plugin has been dropped due to poor sales and the fact that I’ve written a script that does what Proof Block did an much, much more. In a future post, I’ll talk about that. Second, Trackplan Tools for designing model railroads will no longer be available. On the upside, a lot of functionality from that plugin like tangent lines and curves will be rolled into a new plugin. I think you’ll like it. I use it daily!

All the best,

Concatenate CC: 20th anniversary edition

It’s hard to believe it was 20 years ago that I first wrote the Concatenate plugin to join lines from imported CAD files. In all these years, Concatenate has never seen a price increase or a charge for a compatibility upgrade. Since the CS6-CC version is completely rewritten for Illustrator CC from a new library, it will be treated as a new product, but at the original 1997 price. Improvements are already planned for it so updates are imminent, but since it’s as functional as the original it seems best to make it available to people to add to their CC toolset as I’ve added it to mine. For a limited time, you can take advantage of a 50% discount with the coupon code shown on the product page.

Other plugins will be arriving very soon, as well.

Thank you for your support and encouragement over the years!

Concatenate CC for Mac and Windows

CC public betas available

As development progresses, I’m pleased to offer public betas of the three free plugins, Arrowheads, Isometric Line Tool, and Select Menu for CS6–CC 2017. Just scroll down on the Plugin page until you see the new blue beta buttons.

Plugin page with free CC downloads

If you use a version of CC that’s not included here, please let me know and I’ll be happy to add it. Some of the features are yet to be added, but they’re useful enough as is that I use them myself every day. Please let me know if you encounter any unexpected behavior or have an improvement you’d like to see added.

To sign up to test the other plugins, please visit the beta area and follow the instructions there.

Beta tester download area

All the best,

Concatenate plugin’s line-joining origins

Every plugin I’ve written has a story, or more specifically, experiences in using Adobe Illustrator when I’ve thought “Gee, if one could only…” and so in 1993 I wrote Concatenate to address a frequent dilemma.

If you’ve ever imported CAD files or GIS data for maps, chances are your first reaction was something like “wow, there’s a lot of detail here, it’ll save me a ton of time!” But once you started working with it you probably had some reservations, thinking “Oh no, this must be made up of a gazillion tiny pieces!”

  

That’s what I thought when I started working on maps like this one of the Twin Cities for an article by Steve Glischinski in the December 2003 issue of Trains magazine. The image on the left shows USGS (US Geological Survey) data imported into Adobe Illustrator via Avenza’s MAPublisher plugin. Here I had imported data for streets and highways, railroads, and inland waterbodies. It looked much more like a map once I simplified and colored it with the help of my Concatenate plugin.

As this image of small-town streets and highways here shows, GIS data is similar to imported CAD data in that it’s made up of many short paths laid end-to-end. Generally, the paths end at every point where they meet or cross another path.

By selecting one or more paths, I used Concatenate’s Assimilate function to join the paths whose endpoints were within 0.25 points apart and within 10° of tangent. By adjusting this setting, I could control which paths were concatenated, restricting it to those that formed a fairly straight line. A second pass concatenated the other side of the divided highway. Now this main road can be given a prominent style and the secondary roads made lighter and/or thinner.

As you can see in the top right image, the inland lakes were stroked and filled with blue. Most of them are already joined as closed paths with occasional cleanup, but the rivers had to be concatenated into longer paths which I then applied Illustrator’s Object > Path > Simplify function on (usually set to curved lines between 97-100% accuracy). Hiding other layers helped eliminate visual clutter as well as restricting selections to the paths I needed to work on. The many streets made the city railroad map use more memory and storage than was really needed, so I used the Concatenate plugin on that, also, again starting by concatenating lines within a few degrees of tangent, then selecting and concatenating again with slightly larger values. Finally, I simplified the paths to remove excess points so that the street grids became what they appeared to be, longer streets that simply crossed each other. This becomes especially important when creating art for digital media, since low-power phones and tablets have to draw every line if the art is left in vector format.

So, where is Concatenate for CS6 and CC now?

Concatenate is currently in beta testing and coming along nicely. I use it myself regularly at my day job, and today worked on refining the Assimilate function. It’s available to testers now and should be released soon.

In its public debut, the plugin will likely be missing the ability to record it as an Action, but I felt users who rely on it would prefer earlier access and a few free updates as I restore original features and add some new ones, as well.

You can expect versions for CS6, CC, CC 2014, CC 2015, CC 2015.3, and CC 2017, in addition to Mac OS X and Windows 32- and 64-bit versions. I’d like to thank our friends at Hot Door for providing the tools that made these newer versions possible.

All the best,

Plugin progress: beta round 2 for CS6 and CC

Whew!

All of the main plugins are now in testing after having been completely rewritten for CS6 and CC. Some of the details are missing, but in many ways they’re already improved over the previous versions. I’d really hoped to have them finished by now, but if you don’t want to wait and are willing to report bugs and overlook some rough spots until the polish is completed, you can start using them now by becoming a beta tester.

Just send me a message that you’d like to test them, state your OS and AI version and a bit about your background with Adobe Illustrator, and I’ll get back to you.  There’s still room for a few more pioneering souls in this group!

Select Menu for CS6 now available

SelectMenuCS6The first Graffix plugin for Illustrator CS6, Select Menu, is now available. Another update is coming for CC versions, soon after other plugins are updated. The next version of Select Menu is expected to add other object types, such as point text and area text. As always, this version is free!

Update: Separate versions are needed for 32- or 64-but versions for Windows.

Download for Mac
Download CS6 32-bit for Windows
Download CS6 64-bit for Windows

If you find Select Menu useful, but long for more options, you may want to check out Hot Door Software\’s NitPicker panel. It allows you to select art items according to an array of criteria, and save those settings for future custom searches.