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ToolShed Transform tool updates

If you often need to align art objects with paths, that just got a lot easier with an update to ToolShed’s Transform tool. With your art selected and Transform tool active, just shift-click the path you want to align to, and the art snaps into alignment!

Transform tool-align to-path functionLike Adobe Illustrator’s Free Transform tool, you can drag to move, rotate, or scale the art, but ToolShed’s version does a few things Adobe’s tool doesn’t:

  • Click to recalculate the bounding box based on the art’s contents
  • Alt/Option-click to choose your own anchor point for scaling and rotating
  • Double-click to reset the bounding box and reset the anchor point to the selection center
  • Alt/Option-drag to rotate the bounding box
  • Shift-click to rotate the art to align with a chosen point on a path
  • Shift-Alt/Option-click to align the bounding box with a point on a path.

In addition, ToolShed adds three menu items to work with bounding boxes:

  • Object > Transform > Get Bounding Box Rotation… will display the bounding box of a selected art object.
  • Object > Transform > Set Bounding Box Rotation… will display a dialog where you can specify the angle of the bounding box.
  • Object > Transform > Restore Original Rotations… will rotate each selected art object to its original orientation.
Bounding box madness

If you work with Adobe’s Free Transform tool a lot or have AI set to display bounding boxes, you have probably noticed some weird behavior regarding rotations. Simple paths work fine, but art types like groups and compound paths have a parent object that contains the child art objects. When you rotate these heirarchical art types, the accumulated rotation metadata is added to the individual child art, but may not be applied to the container itself. In addition, Adobe’s bounding box may not read rotation information that is in fact there in some art types.

Using ToolShed’s Transform tool, you can easily fix misbehaving bounding boxes in order to manipulate art within ToolShed, but please be aware that Adobe Illustrator is inconsistent in how or even if it determines bounding box rotations. If this drives you crazy, be assured that it’s  not you. Adobe Illustrator is crazy. ToolShed can help make your work life a little more sane.

Rick

AxoTools adds Tangent Line tool

AxoTools now includes a new Tangent Line tool.
Tangent Line tool
To use it, move your cursor over a path near the point you want the tangent line to begin. You’ll see a guide line appear showing the tangent angle. Click on the path and drag a line, which will be constrained tangent to the path. If you press Alt or Option, the tangent point will be adjusted, if possible, to align with your cursor. If you drag to another path, the tool will draw concentric rings when it’s near a tangent point there. For best results, find the spot where the rings collapse into a solid blue ball.

tangent line tool dragging

If your Draw Settings have checked “Automatically concatenate lines” then paths at both the start and end points will be cut and concatenated (joined). While dragging, you can press the keys “J” to toggle line concatenation or “W” to automatically assign stroke widths to path remnants.
The preferences includes a new item for “Curve tangent precision” which will affect both the Tangent Line tool and the extruding process for curve fitting. The default value of 0.1 will probably work fine for most or all of your work, but you can adjust it as high as 1 for faster performance or as fine as 0.001 for the most precision.
I’ve actually wanted a tool like this for my own work since the 90s, so it’s a thrill to be able to finally offer it to other AxoTools users. The added tool is part of a free update, available for download now.
I hope you find it useful!

Call for AxoTools testers: compound rotations

If you’ve checked the About Box of the AxoTools update for Illustrator 25.1, you may have seen a Documentation button that leads to a preview of an upcoming feature, compound rotations through a Transformations panel.

Transformations panel         lamp

If you’d like to try the latest beta builds, please contact me at beta @ rj-graffix.com and let me know your user name as registered at the rj-graffix.com website. You can also join in the conversation in the beta section of the new forum if you ask to be included in that group.

I hope to hear from you soon!

Educational discounts

Photo ©2020 Matt Johnson https://www.behance.net/MATTJIPHON5187

Schools and colleges may be eligible for a significant discount on the Productivity Pack set of plugins. For example, the University of Wisconsin would qualify for at least one free corporate license covering 25 students across all UW campuses in the state. A private school such as Marquette University High School would qualify for at least one studio license covering 10 students at their Milwaukee campus at 50% off.

To apply, simply fill out the form on the main menu at Support > Educational Discount.

Graffix Educational Discount

Thank you to all of the instructors who give so much and help so many.

Improved Transform tool

Coercing one shape to fit over another is fairly simple when everything is at right angles, but too often I found that’s just not the geometry we’re dealt. For those times, I added some new functionality to the Transform tool in the ToolShed plugin collection.

Say you need to add more detail to an object and have a scanned image to trace, but the image is out of proportion and your art is at some random angle. No problem! First, move the scanned image so some point matches the art you’re aligning it with.

Rotate the scanned image so that the centerlines align, then Option- or Alt-click the anchor point to set a custom anchor for ToolShed’s Transform tool.

Holding down the Option or Alt key to force scaling to use your anchor point, adjust the bounding box’s horizontal and vertical handles so that your images align.

If the bounding box of your raster object isn’t aligned with the axis of the image itself, no problem. Hold Option or Alt and rotate the axis where you want them. Now you can size the object without the hassle of measuring the angle and setting a custom constrain angle in Illustrator’s preferences.

And it works on any Adobe Illustrator art object that can be scaled or rotated, not just images. Now it’s easier than ever to get your geometry to align! Download ToolShed and try it out with the 1,000 free trial uses. That’s right, a thousand, and they don’t expire after some too-short period that seems to expire just before you have time to really test it! It’s only $15 for more tools than you can count on both hands.

Subscription plugins?

Everyone who pays for software seems to have an opinion on subscription models, not often positive. I can understand, though, how for some people it actually works pretty well. Let it go on the record that I would never (as in never ever) move my Illustrator plugins to a subscription-only basis, but timed licensing is supported by the online authentication software I have (kudos to NSP-Code for a great product), and it got me thinking that it may be a nice option to offer. Sometimes a job arrives with CAD files that could make a nice starting point for the project. Rather than manually trace it all, it might be nice to “rent” Concatenate for the duration of the project and reuse many or most of those vectors. I think a lot of people would agree that the twenty bucks for Concatenate is pretty small compared to the savings it returns in its first project alone. Or when you divide a ten-dollar plugin into a few months’ fee, it pretty much comes down to pocket change. Then again, maybe there’s a situation that works for both parties, like one year’s access to Productivity Pack or a site or corporate license. I’m open to suggestions!