Adobe Illustrator
Square Up: Free Transform’s new best friend
Newer versions of Illustrator CC have tools that allow you to draw casual rectangles and it automatically converts them to nice, square objects. But what if you’re working with customer-supplied art or something that had been distorted by previous transformations? You probably won’t start with something as sorry as the image shown here, but it’s not a problem if you did.
Using the Square Up plugin for Adobe Illustrator, simply select “Vertical and horizontal” from the popup menu and click the Go button.
Almost instantly, your path(s) will become nice and square!
What if your art is rotated, and you want it to stay that way? No problem…
Just select “Object’s dominant axis from the popup menu and the plugin will calculate the general angle of your art.
If several objects are selected, all of them will be squared to the same angle.
When placing many rectangular shapes where several may need to be at the same arbitrary angle or each a bit different, the Free Transform tool is really helpful.
After dragging duplicates of the same rectangle around, you may notice it’s a bit skewed. I found with the newer versions of Illustrator that constrained transformations are no longer a given, and accidentally distorting a rectangle is unfortunately easy.
It’s no problem with Square Up, though. With the click of a button, the art is re-squared and the bounding box’s rotation is set to match the rotation of the art. If you do technical or production art, this could be a real timesaver. Go ahead and give it a test run. The trial period is based on usage, not time, so you’ll have plenty of opportunities to put it through its paces and try out the other modes, such as aligning to the AI Preferences constrain angle or just collapsing the control handles to remove all curves from the path.
You can find it here, and download the one for your platform and AI version. Can this be made easier to use, or more flexible? Feel free to say so. Your comments and suggestions are always welcomed. I’m an illustrator, too, so as Red Green says, “we’re all in this together.”
Concatenate updated to v. 16.1
This is the best version of Concatenate ever (IMHO), and I find it’s a real pleasure to use. This update is highly recommended for all users. “What’s new?” you might ask. First, the two checkbox options are gone. Averaging anchor points is now built in. Why would anyone want short connectors between them? If you do, by all means let me know and if there’s enough demand, I’ll be happy to bring that back. Next, the option to average the control points is gone. I’ve never used it, since the results have never really given results I was happy with. Instead, I added an option to smooth joins between two curved paths by aligning the control handles. Of course, we don’t always want all curves smoothed, so there’s a setting to specify a range within which smoothing will be done. With a setting of 0, only paths that are already perfectly aligned will remain perfectly aligned. I.e., nothing changes. You could enter a value up to 180 degrees, in which case every curved join will be smoothed. You can set this to any setting that gives you a satisfactory result.
A couple of under-the-hood changes that allow the plugin to run faster are less obvious. Most significant is a change that makes Concatenate smarter about which paths to consider for assimilation, which also solves a problem of occasional benign errors and their pesky dialogs, most noticeable when layers are hidden.
But wait, there’s more to come! Concatenate is often used with very large map or CAD files, and when it’s evaluating tens, or even hundreds of thousands of path segments, operations can take much more than the almost instant results we’re used to. For those situations, a progress bar will be added soon.
If you have observations about this update or ideas of any way Concatenate or Assimilate can be made better, please let me know. Remember, I’m an illustrator like you and, as Red Green used to say, “We’re all in this together.”
Whatever happened to…
If you’ve been using Graffix plugins for a while, you may have noticed a few of them are missing from the current lineup. I’ll explain why you shouldn’t miss them. The story behind the apparent demise of the Proof Block plugin is explained in this post. There’s actually a much better way to accomplish what this plugin did, so it would actually be a disservice to continue to offer and encourage the use of this plugin (albeit, as Obe Wan said, “from a certain point of view”).
Another is Arrowheads. Again, there’s now a better way to do this, as explained in this Adobe blog. To add the white halo, I just apply a graphic style that adds a white stroke behind the black, offset a bit to the upper right. Rather than offsetting the highlight, you may want to just use a heavier stroke to apply equal white all the way around.
The last to disappear is the Trackplan Tools plugin. I wrote this one specifically for use at my day job, and given it was so specialized, I’ll apologize to its four users for taking it off the list.
Over the past few years, there have been many times I’d wished I had another plugin to do some task. Now that I again have the time and tools to write current-version AI plugins, I’ll be adding them. Those who already bought the Productivity Pack will find new plugins automatically added to their suite of licenses.
Thanks for your support. I promise more plugins are coming soon.
Whatever happened to the Proof Block plugin?
Some of you may recall a plugin called Proof Block. It ranked even below the Alien Palette in popularity, although I’ve used it myself at my day job for over 20 years. For the most part, it was little more than a small form to be initialed by people proofing various drafts of artwork prior to publishing. I was inspired to write it by the recurring problem we had of a copy-and-paste version that would sometimes peek back at us from a QuarkXPress graphic frame. My solution was to create a “proof block” layer, place the form on it, then the plugin set it to printable when opened in Illustrator, but non-printing and not visible when closing the document. Crisis solved!
Perhaps you’d still like something like that. It’s really not that difficult to write a script to draw the lines, boxes, and text, but I’m a staunch advocate of using a script, not a plugin, for that now. My proof block script today does everything that the plugin did, and much more. First, we have a document naming convention so the script can discern the magazine name, date, story code, and even look up the editors on its staff. It handles dates, keeps track of proof iterations, and even stores a record of the revision history in the document. When I save the document to the art server, the script saves a copy to the correct folder on the editorial server. If it’s a first draft, it fetches the illustrator’s name from Outlook, looks up the designer’s email and alerts her that art is available to place in InDesign. When the art is approved, it’s marked as such and the related editors, art director, and designer are notified.
In addition, scripts check for missing fonts, placed art that should be embedded, look for RGB colors in a CMYK document, and more. It’s also much easier to revise than a plugin. Since everybody’s needs and workflow are quite different, it wouldn’t be useful to anybody to share my script, but I will share my enthusiasm for scripting it as one component of a larger process. I promise that once your custom script is used, you won’t look back.
Isometric Line Tool for CC
Another free plugin! I really can’t call it new because this one’s been a popular download for years, but it is still free. It does one simple function: it draws straight lines constrained to isometric angles (unless you hold down the shift key for 45-degree constraints or Option/Alt for no constraints), but this time, however, it’s a bit better. It borrows some functions from the Concatenate plugin so new lines are automatically joined if they’re drawn from the endpoint of another.
You probably already know that isometric drawings are easier when you turn on Smart Guides with the 60-degree preset and construction guides checked. Combine this with the free Isometric Actions and isometric clipart, and that was pretty much my toolkit for technical and assembly drawings until I discovered CADtools. Isometric Line Tool, however, is still one of my main tools. I gave it the keyboard shortcut “Y” (naturally) and use it often for simple tasks.
Please feel free to download and try the Isometric Line Tool. I hope it serves you long and well!
Select Menu for CC
Buried not-too-deeply in Adobe’s SDK (Software Developer’s Kit) is a list of pre-defined art object types. While some were included in Illustrator’s Select > Object menu, many more were not. It seemed useful to select the other object types, as well, and objects such as paths had properties that were easily obtained and often helpful to select within an illustration. In that spirit, I wrote Select Menu plugin and, given that it was relatively simple to build and applicable to casual users, I’d make it available for free.
It’s not always clear though, what each object type represents, so please understand than some of these choices are simply passed along to you to use to the extent that Adobe uses them when creating their digital form of your artwork. For example, if you use the Shaper tool in CC 2017, you’ll see in the Layers Panel that a Shaper Group has been created. That object type isn’t in the list, though, so finding them would involve examining every object in the document and examining its structure and properties to select those that fit the definition of a Shaper Group. I hope to find enough data on Shapers, Envelopes, and other objects to add them to the menu, so updates are likely in the foreseeable future.
Illustrator CC added Point Text Objects and Area Text Objects, so Select Menu adds them for CS6 users as well. In addition, it adds the following 27 items for everybody:
- Legacy Text Objects
- Path Text Objects
- Guides
- Paths
- Open Paths
- Closed Paths
- Filled Paths
- Unfilled Paths
- Stroked Paths
- Unstroked Paths
- Dashed Paths
- Undashed Paths
- Compound Paths
- Styled Art
- Unstyled Art
- Opaque Art
- Transparent Art
- Symbols
- Groups
- Live Objects
- Gradient Meshes
- Raster Art
- Placed Art
- Graphs
- Plugin Art
I hope the menu is as helpful for you as it has been for me. If it fails to select an object you feel it should, please copy that object into a separate Illustrator document and send it to me as a bug report. If I can find the problem, I’ll fix it.
The topic of item selection can be taken much farther, though, so if you want a real selection power tool, you’ll probably not find one better than Hot Door’s NitPicker plugin, which I find indispensable in addition to Select Menu.
Square Up plugin for CC now available
If you’re familiar with the Square Up plugin, you may happy to know that it’s now available for Illustrator CS6 through CC 2017.
Have you ever been given a project with almost-usable art to use as a starting point? You know, the kind where straight lines should be at right angles, but it’s just a little bit cockeyed? I used to manually snap every point to a grid, but thought “good grief, there must be a simpler way.” That’s when I got the idea for Square Up. With it, you can just select the paths you want to straighten, select how you want them aligned, and “click” it’s done. There are four methods of squaring which could probably benefit from a brief explanation.
- Horizontal and vertical: OK, this one may be self-explanatory, but I’ll elaborate anyway. The plugin first collapses all control handles so that any organic shape will become a polygon or polyline. It then measures the angle of each segment, and if it’s roughly vertical, the horizontal position of the endpoints are averaged so that it becomes true vertical, with similar treatment of horizontal segments. If it’s somewhere around 45 degrees, it just leaves it.
- Preferences constrain angle: This one works similar to the first option, but aligns segments either parallel or perpendicular to whatever you set your constrain angle to in Illustrator’s preferences.
- Object’s dominant axis: This is my favorite. I found that as I use Illustrator’s Free Transform tool to resize and rotate a rectangular object, like the outline of a structure on a map or architectural plan, the object gradually degrades to something resembling a parallelogram. The plugin measures all of the segments’ angles and averages them, then uses that as a major axis to align with. It even works on a group of objects that need to be rotated to the same angle.
- Just collapse control handles: Because sometimes all we want is to sharpen the corners.
I might mention that the plugin now comes in a new, compact size. At first I made a panel that mimicked the dialog shown here, then realized it didn’t have to be that huge. Even though panels (remember when we called them palettes?) have some real advantages over modal dialog boxes, there is a point where they begin to crowd our work area so I promise not to make mine larger than they really have to be.
Please feel free to try it out!