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Measurements made easier

Measuring and then entering distances and angles can be a lot of busywork, which AxoTools Measure tool can help streamline. Just click and drag with the Measure tool. These values are entered into the AxoTools Information panel as measured on your artboard in orthographic projection, as well as the three axonometric planes of your current document projection, plus the depth axis of any currently-defined auxiliary projection.

In addition, many of the text fields in AxoTools panels have shortcuts to import values from that panel. For example, you can drag the tool along an edge of an extrude art object to measure its length and angle. Then in the Extrude panel, double-click the Distance and Angle field labels to automatically enter the last-measured values, then simply click the Extrude button. It’s so fast and easy, it almost feels like we’re cheating!

easy extruding

The double-click trick also works for the Projection panel’s X and Z axis fields and the Transformation panel’s Extrude distance field. To auto-enter values into the Transformation’s Move/Rotate field, just type an “a” for angle or “d” for distance as appropriate for your current operation. In the transformation panel’s two fields, you can also type “=” to toggle the value between positive and negative.

measuring an axonometric angle

You may want to measure the difference between two angles on an axonometric drawing. Using Illustrator’s built-in Measure tool, you would measure one angle, write down the result, measure another angle, write down that result, then do the math to find the difference, and it would still only be accurate for the flattened view. AxoTools’ Measure tool can work as an axonometric protractor — just click on an anchor point, then drag between two points. You’ll see the corresponding angle from your axonometric plane.

Now you can also now do simple math operations in many of AxoTools’ panels’ fields. For example, you can enter “.25 in + 2mm” and the Extrude panel will calculate the equivalent distance in your current document ruler units (e.g., 23.6693 pt). You can also do math on angles, such as “90 – 32.48” for “57.52°.” Division is done with a “/” character and multiplication with a “*” character.

You can download AxoTools and try it out with 1,000 trial operations. It’s on sale for 1/3 off through May 2022, with annual subscriptions 1/2 off, starting as low as $5!

Enter measurements your way in AxoTools

With the latest update to AxoTools, you can enter measurements in whatever units you’re comfortable with. Here’s an example:

extrude units in mmextrude units in inches

Say your document ruler units is set to inches, but you need to extrude something to a distance you have in mm. Illustrator supports that within the app, but it’s not automatically there for plugins. Measurement fields in AxoTools now do that conversion for you. I really hadn’t planned at first on adding that — there’s a back story here.

First, all art in Adobe Illustrator is measured internally in points. Fortunately, Adobe’s interface for plugins includes a function that takes measurements from text typed by the user in the current ruler units and converts it to a numeric value calculated as points. Then another function converts numeric point values used within the plugin to text that plugins can give back to the user, calculated and formatted using their current ruler units. That’s great, but there are a lot of users in other parts of the world that use a comma as a decimal separator. Fortunately, Adobe added a variation of these functions that support international number formats. Unfortunately, the one that parses text with commas in decimals doesn’t see the commas, and the values get multiplied by ten, a hundred, or a thousand! Adobe’s bug became my bug.

To support my European customers, I wrote a function that parses the numbers typed, and honors commas as decimal separators, and wondered “Why not look at the units specified, as well?” All values need to be converted to points anyway for the plugin to work with, so it wasn’t a great leap code-wise.

draw settings units

As an extension of that, I wrote a function to convert values back to text with a caveat of my own. In AxoTools’ Draw Settings panel, users can specify standard stroke weights, but we don’t all use points for strokes — many use mm. Stroke measurements have little to do with our current ruler units, so the plugin lets you specify pt or mm, does the math when needed, then remembers your preference to always display it your way.

It can be frustrating dealing with bugs, but sometimes bugs can become butterflies!

2022 plugins may crash older Macs under Catalina

I have received a handful of reports that 2022 plugins either crash Illustrator or Illustrator refuses to load them citing a conflict with its internal plugins. So far, affected systems are:

  • 2013 or 2014 27″ iMac or
    2012 MacBook Pro
  • macOS 10.15 Catalina
  • Adobe Illustrator 2022

The problem may be resolved by updating macOS to Big Sur (11.0) or higher, if your Mac supports it (late 2013 models and newer).

If the plugins continue to crash under macOS 11 or higher, please use the contact form using the button below and include:

  • Your computer model
  • OS version
  • Description of problem (crash or no-load dialog)
  • Crash report if available

Another option, of course, is to continue using Adobe Illustrator 25 (2021) with the corresponding version of the plugins.

Contact Support

AxoTools extruded path layering and grouping explained

Extrusion in Layers panelAxoTools is not a 3D application, but tries to assist illustrators in achieving a 3D look the best it can. Simple shapes are pretty straightforward, but complicated shapes can wind over and under each other like an Escher drawing. In that case, AxoTools evaluates the paths and makes its best guess on correctly stacking the pieces.

When a path is extruded, AxoTools creates closed paths for fillable areas and open paths of multiple stroke weights. To make things more easily edited, the pieces are organized into groups. In the Layers panel, you can expand these groups to find the pieces you may want to edit. Compound paths contain elements nested inside of other elements, so things get a bit more complex.

The front surface is named as a “cap,” and is placed above all of the edge pieces. The edges, which give it depth, are divided into surfaces. Each surface is composed of fillable “panels,” stroked “paths” that follow the original path’s shape, and “connector” pieces for corners that connect the front cap to the rear cap (the rear cap and hidden surfaces may or may not be drawn depending on your Extrude panel settings).

An example of editing the stacking order of an extruded path can be found here in the AxoTools online documentation.

Build a dodecahedron in AxoTools!

AxoTools dodecahedron

This is not an animation, but a screen recording right out of Adobe Illustrator! Each face of this dodecahedron is a live Transformation object created from the same pentagon shape, with movements and rotations added in the AxoTools Transformations panel.

Sure, it’s unlikely you’ll ever need a shape like this, but we often need art rotated away from our usual three planes. This demonstrates how, whether it’s a skylight, an instrument panel, or graphics on a milk carton, that task is now a whole lot easier!

You can download this file from the link at the end of this post and with AxoTools installed, even in demo mode, examine how this crazy “disco ball” was built.

Each facet is made from a pentagonal path, turned into a live object that specifies its movements and rotations. The orientation is set relative to the current AxoTools projection, so in the AxoTools Projection panel you can adjust the settings with the dial controls to see the dodecahedron rotate as a unit in real time!

When Ron Kempke built this, he used his math superpowers to determine the angles and offsets.

dodecahedron specs (AxoTools)

But fear not! For those who would rather not break out a scientific calculator, it’s possible to let Illustrator do most of the heavy lifting. First, make a copy of your base pentagon to create some guide art. Imagine the dodecahedron as two “tulip” shapes placed face-to-face. We know that the shape across the “shoulders” of the tulip would be equal to five segments equal to the width across the base pentagon. That will allow us to draw a top view of the shape.

AxoTools dodecahedron geometry 1

The offset from the base pentagon to the section at the shoulders tell us the foreshortening of the slope of each “pedal.” Draw vertical guides this distance apart. Draw a vertical line from the base of the pentagon to the height of its shoulders. Rotate this line until its width matches the offset distance in the top view. Measure the angle of this line (26.56° in this case) for use in the Transformation objects later. Draw a horizontal guide at the top of this rotated line.

AxoTools dodecahedron geometry 2

Copy the pentagon and rotate the copy 180°, then position it so each pentagon’s tip and shoulders match as shown below. Select the pentagons and scale them vertically, using the foreshortened height of the rotated line as a guide.

AxoTools dodecahedron geometry 3

This art, of course, isn’t a real side view, since the upper and lower pieces would be horizontally scaled and sheared differently. We’re only interested in finding the foreshortened vertical dimensions in order to create our Transformation objects.

With these principles in mind, click the link below to download Ron’s file and examine the settings in each piece.

Download the .ai file Download AxoTools

Now, who’s up to building a tetrahedron?

Text edits outside of Illustrator, using TextSync

Sometimes we run into jobs that require variations of artwork where we start with a sample, and once approved, the customer provides the remainder of the information. This often means duplicating what we have and embarking on a tedious process of changing the parts that are different. If the text needs more than one style, re-applying fonts, weights, colors, etc., can become time consuming. Here’s a way to streamline that process using the TextSync plugin.

Say we’re doing a series of information on various states. Let’s start with Minnesota, using a state outline and an area text object. Since the text frame may shrink or grow from one state to another, it’s probably a good idea to go to the Type menu and set the Area Type Options to enable Auto Size.

Minnesota infoIn this first example, we set the state name to a larger size, bold, and add a color. Assign a character style (I called it “State”). Assign the remaining text another style (in this case “info”). Select the capital city of St. Paul and change its formatting, then assign a style. Next, the term “Vikings” will change for other states, so select it and assign a new style, even though the actual formatting doesn’t change from the text surrounding it. Last, assign a character style to the text of the beer name.

TextSync example Layer's panel

In the Layers panel, duplicate the layer and give each a descriptive name. With nothing selected, export all of the text of the document with the menu command File > TextSync > Export Text Objects…  You’ll see a dialog prompting you to create a text file to save the data in. At this point your document contains a hidden index correlating the text objects to each line item of the file. Because of the way the text is broken into blocks according to its formatting, it’s probably easiest to edit it in a spreadsheet application such as Microsoft Excel. Here’s what our sample’s file looks like:

spreadsheet 1

The first column contains the ID of each text object. Do not change or delete these! The “<p>” at the beginning of column C represents a paragraph break. Similarly, a tab character would be indicated with a “<t>” notation. You can see here that it’s helpful to not include the return character in the formatted state text, so that it stays in the column we won’t edit.

Let’s select cell B1 and change the state name to Illinois. Now tab to column F and change Vikings to Bears, then change the beer name in column H, then make changes for Wisconsin in row 2.

spreadsheet 2

Now we’ll import this back into our Illustrator document. We can save this file out as tab-delimited text and in Illustrator, select it with the menu item File > TextSync > Import Text Objects… A faster way, though, if you’re editing the text file on the same computer as your Illustrator file, is this:

  • Select the data
  • Copy the data to the clipboard
  • In Illustrator, press the Alt or Option key as you select the menu item to import.

Your text will update with formatting preserved, because the tabs in the exported file represent the areas where formatting changes. That’s why we gave the football team its own character style, even though the characters didn’t really change. If we replace the state outlines to match, we’ll get something like this:

Illinois infoWisconsin info

To change the text formatting, you need only double-click the character style in the Character Styles panel and change the specifications there, and the text with that style will update everywhere in the document.

You’ll probably find this most useful for when you have many labels with similar formatting, or using layers with different specifications for different products.

If you have one or more text objects selected when you export, only the selected objects will be exported. With nothing selected, everything is exported. If text files are imported with no IDs or IDs that don’t correlate with existing text objects, new text objects will be created, one for each line of text. This can be useful for importing files with lists of callouts to be added.

Please keep in mind that each “chunk” of text represents what’s known internally in Illustrator as a text run. Each text run ends and a new one begins where the formatting changes. TextSync doesn’t support specific format changes, but was created to allow the contents of many formatted callouts to be exported and edited outside of Illustrator, then updated in their original locations with minimal effort.

I hope this saves you as much time as it’s saved me. Remember, it comes with 100 trial uses to import and export to test if it’s useful for you.

Illustrator AppleScripts updated for 2020-21

Holy mackerel (as Wisconsin governor Tony Evers — and I — would say), it’s sure been a while since the free Illustrator scripts here were updated. The old version 10 scripts are still there, along with 31 updated for Illustrator 2020 and 2021. I’ve recently retired, but there’s no reason the scripts can’t continue working for others! They’re AppleScripts for Macs, but that’s what I knew best and what I worked on at the magazine publisher.

There aren’t any wiffy design effects. It’s more a collection of in-the-trenches workhorse scripts that got me through a lot of mundane tasks. Here’s an example. Revising old maps or illustrations can get complicated when text styles change from one year to the next, or from one publication to another. When I created the templates for each title they included character styles for callouts, figure numbers, titles, cities, states, copyright, etc. When reusing older art, there were different approaches one could take with the help of a few scripts.

I’d typically start with a new document using a template, then copy and paste the old art into the new document. With everything still selected, choose the script “re-apply char styles” so, for example, the old-styled text would be updated to the current font specs. The script first hides all unselected text so all you see is the new stuff. Next it updates selected text to defined styles, and the updated text is then hidden as well. At this point, the remaining text needs to be assigned one of the standard character styles. This eliminates the problem of straggler callouts that show up later in an oddball font or size. Now you can show the hidden art and make adjustments as needed. More often than not, the art needed to be scaled to fit a different size or shape, so after scaling, the selected text can have its standard font size restored in one fell swoop.

The templates I made include sample text showing all of the character styles, as well as graphic bits with symbols and graphic styles. Sometimes it was simpler to copy these samples to older art (saved under a new file name) and run the script “redefine char styles from selection.” The selected sample art can now be deleted, then run the script “find unstyled text” to select and apply standard styles to any style stragglers.

If a script is not quite what you need, I’d encourage you to open it in a script editor and experiment with modifying it.

Adobe Illustrator AppleScripts for 2020-21

I hope you find them useful!

Using oblique projections with AxoTools

oblique projection 1Update: now with AxoTools 16.2, there’s an easier way!

Ron Kempke, who wrote the math behind AxoTools, has provided a follow-up to this post on using an auxiliary view in AxoTools, with these steps on taking it a step farther. Even with the oblique plane rotated at all three axes, we can still construct an auxiliary view and establish an axis for extruded art on that plane.

In this example, we have a simple cube with one corner removed. With the three sides projected, the triangle shape practically draws itself, but a problem arises when other objects need to be added that match this orientation.

Here, Ron walks us through this process using the AxoTools Projection panel along with Illustrator’s built-in Scale and Rotate tools.

To start, we need to do some construction drawing in the orthographic top view. You’ll probably want to work on copies of these views. Select the long side (hypotenuse) of the triangular shape in the top view. Copy and paste it, then rotate it 90°. Position this line to divide the shaded triangle at its right-angle corner at the corner of the cube. Use this as a guide to draw the red guide triangle.

Align the right angle of this triangle with the upper left corner of the right side view. Rotate the top view to match the guide triangle, as shown in the blue square below, then project this to the axonometric top view.

oblique projection 2

Use Illustrator’s Measure tool to measure the angles of this projected shape. Enter these values into the Axis fields of the Projection panel, which will then become a new (but temporary) axonometric view. The top face of the preview proxy cube in the Projection panel should resemble the rotated cube in your art. Note that these values are for this example only; your angles will certainly be different. If you now project the left and right ortho views, it should resemble the blue cube shown above.

Select the right orthographic view and scale it so that the shaded triangle matches the width of the red guide triangle.

oblique projection 4

Now on this foreshortened right side view, rotate a copy of the angled line -90° as shown. Here it’s colored green to distinguish it from red guide lines. Remember that having entered new values into the Projection panel axis fields, your projection now matches the blue cube shown below. Project the new guides into your axo view.

oblique projection 5

Measure the angle of the green guide line that represents the perpendicular, and save that value for later. Rotate the oblique surface and red guide lines so that the perpendicular is perfectly vertical.

 

oblique projection 6

oblique projection 7

If you’ve entered the new X and Z axis angles correctly, the top surface of the preview cube will be oriented at the same angles as your red guide lines.

oblique projection 8

You now have an orthographic (top-left) view of your oblique surface! Add your additional details. It’s worth noting that the red guide line at the top corresponds to the upper edge of the surface on the top view.

oblique projection 9

oblique projection 10

Now extrude any objects on this surface, along the vertical axis. You can do so visually with the Extrude tool, or numerically with the Extrude panel (be sure to check the Foreshorten option). If you have a left or right view showing the depth of the objects on this view and you’ve placed reference points for these views, you can drag by reference in the side view and the depth will be measured and foreshortened for you. (If you extrude a shape on this surface numerically from the Extrude panel, you should be aware that normally objects at this angle recede, so you’ll have to rotate it 180°.)

If you’re using reference points here, remember to redefine them in your standard ortho views when you’re finished with these details.

oblique projection 11

Finally, set your projection back to isometric or whatever projection your overall illustration used.

In review, the basic steps are:

  • Find the plane’s perpendicular from the top view.
  • Define a projection along the top perpendicular to find the plane’s side perpendicular, which is also its extrusion axis, from a side view.
  • Spin the oblique surface so that its extrusion axis becomes vertical.
  • Define another projection based on the rotated guides and un-project the oblique surface.
  • You now have an ortho view of your oblique surface that you can add details to, and save for future reference.
  • Project a top-left axo view and extrude any objects on that surface.
  • Spin the oblique surface back to its original orientation.

Many thanks to Ron Kempke for this useful and fascinating exercise!

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