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Graffix

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!

Download Isometric Line Tool

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.

Download 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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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!

Download Square Up

 

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)

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

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