ToolShed documentation

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ToolShed is a collection of utility functions accessed through tools and menus in Adobe Illustrator.

Tools:

Stabilized Pencil tool adds a “leash” to a pencil tool to smooth its travels similar to Photoshop’s smoothed brushes. Create corners where you want them and draw smooth broad strokes with ease. Choose your leader length and path smoothing settings.

Offset Open Paths offsets an open or closed path; open paths offset as open, not closed! Use a dialog or tool to offset one or many copies on one or both sides of the target path.

Tangent Arc tool draws circular arcs that are tangent to another path or smoothly continues a path at the angle of its endpoint. The extent of the arc can be very small or nearly a full circle. Press the Alt/Option key to draw a tangent straight line, or press Shift to constrain its angle to increments of 15 degrees.

Transform tool that differs from Adobe’s in that it will not skew your art and lets you choose an anchor point for scaling and rotating.

Bracket tool draws line-style braces using a radius and stroke weight you set in the preferences. Press Alt/Option to flip it the opposite direction, Shift to constrain its angle, or the Up/Down arrow keys to adjust the radius as you draw.

Menu items:

NEW! Remove Duplicate Paths deletes duplicate paths or individual segments of paths that duplicate the bottom-most path.
NEW! Notes panels display text attached to the document, layers, and individual art items.
Offset Open Path works the same as the tool, but with a dialog.
Stacking order lets you change the order of objects based on their position. Options include center, left, right, top, and bottom, ascending or descending. Another option lets you change the stacking order by the size/area of the object. A third option lets you reverse the stacking order, even if the objects are on different layers with other art objects between them.
Create Path Array > Logarithmic creates a series of parallel lines distributed as though they were evenly spaced and wrapped around a cylinder, with live preview.
Create Path Array > Radial creates a group of lines fanning out like a pie chart at equidistant angles, with live preview.
Unscale art will figure the inverse of a scaling factor to restore objects to their original size (or at least very, very close).
Scale to Proportion scales art relative to two given values.
Scale Stroke Weight will scale the line thickness of selected paths without scaling the art itself.
Minimum Stroke Weight will find all paths with a stroke thinner than your minimum and set the width accordingly.
Fade will lighten or darken the stroke and/or fill of a path object by a given percentage.
Isolation menu items allow keyboard shortcuts and recording for entering isolation mode, isolating the next level up, and exiting isolation mode.

Free features

These features are entirely FREE. They will continue to work without licensing (even after the trial period has expired):

Bracket tool
Bust Up Paragraphs
Stacking Order
Unscale
Scale to Proportion
Scale Stroke Weight
Minimum Stroke Weight
Isolation menu

Stabilized Pencil tool

Stabilized Pencil tool adds a “leash” to a pencil tool to stabilize it, similar to Photoshop’s smoothed brushes. Keep corners where you want them and smooth the broad strokes. Once drawn, the path is simplified according to settings you choose.

stabilized pencil preferences
Preferences for the Stabilized Pencil tool are available by double-clicking the tool’s icon.

The Leader Length setting is the maximum distance between your pen point and cursor, similar to the “Leash length” in Photoshop.

The Curve Precision and Angle Threshold values are comparable to the corresponding settings in Adobe Illustrator’s Object > Path > Simplify… dialog.

“Show annotations,” “Show help text,” and color settings are described with the general ToolShed preferences below.

Offset Open Path tool

Graffix OffsetOpenPath demo

Offset Open Path creates an offset copy of a path. Click and drag on a path. It does not need to be selected. If your source path is open, the tool creates another open path, not a closed outline of a thicker version of the path!

As you drag, press Alt or Option to offset paths on the opposite side of your path. Press Shift to flip the offset path from one side or the other. Press the Cursor Up (arrow) key to add additional offset paths between the original path and the new one you’re dragging out of it. Before releasing the mouse, press Control or Command to delete the original path and leave only the copy/copies.

When used on a compound path, it creates offset copies of every path in the compound. The new offset paths are also combined into a new compound path.

offset open paths dialog Click on a path to bring up the Offset Open Path dialog. It does not matter whether the path is selected.

Here you can enter the distance of the offset, as well as the number of times to offset the path.

Check “Preview” to see a preview of the offset paths.

Click the “Set keyboard preferences” button to show the ToolShed Preferences dialog, which is described below.

Click OK to apply the offset paths, or press the Esc key or click Cancel to cancel the operation.

Tangent Arc tool

Tangent Arc tool draws circular arcs constrained tangent to another path or appends it to the end of another path, smoothly added at the angle of the endpoint. Drag the mouse to intuitively determine both the radius of the curve and its extent, which can be a degree or two or nearly a complete circle.

Press Alt/Option to draw a straight line constrained tangent from a curved path or extending an existing path. Press Shift to constrain the line’s angle or arc’s curvature to increments of 15 degrees.

If you click and drag to draw a new arc that is not constrained to another path, it will start at the 0 angle. To assign a different starting angle, click (do not drag yet), then as you move the mouse a line will be drawn between the click point and cursor point. When that guide line displays an angle you like, start dragging to define your arc endpoint.

As you drag, press Shift to constrain the arc’s extent to increments of 15 or Ctrl/Cmd to lock the current radius°.

Transform tool

ToolShed’s Transform tool is similar to Adobe Illustrator’s Free Transform tool, but with some important differences. For one thing, it cannot shear art, so you cannot accidentally shear art when all you want to do is scale it. (If you want to shear the art, you still have the Adobe tool with which to do that.) ToolShed’s Transform tool gives you the option to move the anchor point for scaling and rotating, and you can also change the angle of your bounding box.

In this map example, say we need to make this structure narrower while keeping its sides square to each other, but its bounding box doesn’t align with the art.

To quickly fix this, simply shift-click on any of the straight path segments you want to align the bounding box with.

The bounding box will now appear at the proper angle, and you can safely resize it using the control handles on its sides.

The Transform tool stores and reads the rotation angle from the art. If the object is a group, it reads the rotation information from the group object. You can click the tool to read the rotation angle from the topmost contents of the group. When you ungroup the art, each item it contains will use its own original rotation value.

Here is a summary of modified clicks you can use with ToolShed’s Transform tool:

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 also 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.

Now, say we have another object to add, but it is a raster object, and so we cannot pick up the angle of a path segment. First Alt/Option click to place a new anchor point somewhere along a straight edge of the image, then Alt/Option-drag outside of the image area to rotate the bounding box. You can now scale and rotate the art using the handles without shearing the image.

Another option is to use the menu command Object > Transform > Restore Original Rotations. As shown in the fourth image above, this will rotate the art to the angle set in its bounding box, and the bounding box will be reset to 0.

A related bounding box item, Object > Transform > Get Bounding Box Rotation will display a dialog showing the bounding box rotation of the topmost selected art.

The menu item Object > Transform > Set Bounding Box Rotation will display a dialog similar to the one shown above where you can enter a new bounding box rotation angle to assign to the selected art.

Note: When setting the bounding box angle from the menu, the new setting is applied to every selected item, including those contained in groups. When selecting a group, the tool will display the bounding box rotation of the parent group object, but when ungrouped, each object will retain its original rotation angle. When multiple items are selected, it will display the rotation angle of the topmost art object.

Bracket tool

The bracket tool draws a path forming a bracket (or brace). As you drag, you can hold the Alt/Option key to flip it the opposite direction, and/or Shift to constrain it to the nearest 45° angle. Your curve radius is displayed in the on-screen help text, but you can adjust it dynamically by pressing the Up/Down keys. The increments it uses, in combination with Shift and Alt/Option, can be set in ToolShed’s Preferences. There you can also set the default stroke width for this path, as well as the Radiant and Latitude Lines that ToolShed draws. That dialog can be called in the same menu area as other Illustrator and plugin preferences, or by double-clicking the Bracket tool.

This tool is FREE, no activation required.

Object > Create Path Array > Radial…

This creates a group of lines fanning out like a pie chart at equidistant angles. Again, a preview allows you to adjust the number of divisions to match your art.

Object > Create Path Array > Logarithmic…

This reates a series of parallel lines distributed as though they were evenly spaced and wrapped around a cylinder (or globe). Use the live preview from the settings dialog to check your art before committing with the OK button.

Object > Replace with Top Object

This function replaces selected art with a different art object. For example, say you have six blue circles that you want to replace with gold stars. Make sure that the star is the topmost object, located above the others in the layer panel. Select the menu item Object > Replace with Top Object. The blue circles will be replaced with gold stars, like this:

Here you see six stars, but in the Layers panel, there are seven. What’s up with that?

The star was identified as the reference art, and the six circles below it became target art. Each target object was replaced, so you now have a duplicate star under the original reference art. Your reference art could be something used in some other part of your illustration, so this behavior is often useful. This time, however, press Alt or Option as you select the menu item, and the reference art will be deleted after all substitutions have been made. The new art will be positioned centered over the target art.