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Worker72a Text Overflow Alert now available

wopdThe second Worker72a plugin is now available here. When Text Overflow Alert is installed, it automatically scans all  documents when opened for text frames or text paths with overflowed text, and selects it for you to inspect and edit as needed. You can read more about it on its product page or follow upcoming Worker 72a plugins on the Worker72a download page.

The plugin is on sale through August 2022, with prices as low as $3.00 for an individual license.

Look for more Worker72a plugins in the near future.

Worker72a plugins now part of Graffix

Worker 72a

Worker72a is now part of the Graffix family of Adobe Illustrator plugins

Doug Habben has been writing Adobe Illustrator plugins for a couple of decades, and in 2006 began offering them to the public under the banner of Worker72a. Doug and I have been in touch for many years, trading tips as fellow part-time plugin developers. After several years of retirement from his day job, Doug decided to retire from his own business, as well, and contacted me about handling and maintaining his plugins going forward. We obviously reached an agreement and for the first time, Worker72a plugins will be available for Windows, and also run natively on the new Apple M1 processors.

wopdThe first of Doug’s plugins to migrate over is White Overprint Detector. When installed, it automatically scans all opened documents for text or path art with white overprinting strokes or fills, and selects it for you to inspect and edit as needed. You can read more about it on its product page or follow upcoming Worker 72a plugins on the Worker72a download page.

The plugin is on sale through August 2022, with prices as low as $3.00 for an individual license.

Best wishes to Doug in his “other” retirement!

AxoTools adds Auxiliary Projection panel

Wrangling those oddball oblique angles just got a lot easier!

If you do technical illustrations or just work in isometric, you’ve probably struggled with surfaces that don’t lie on any of the isometric planes. AxoTools’ Transformations panel helps coerce orthographic art into any series of known rotations, but now you have a tool to help place your flat art onto surfaces at oddball angles. Tame those angled walls and tilted panels!

Steaming Cup Cafe

The new Auxiliary Projection panel helps you determine the projection of a path that’s been twisted into something resembling a parallelogram at any angle. With it, you can flatten the oblique art back to an orthographic view, project orthographic art to fit the oblique projection, extrude and move art along the projection’s axes, and draw new matching art following the auxiliary projection’s axis angles.

AxoTools comes with a thousand free trial uses that you can use at your leisure to download and try it out.

For current users, this is a free update. Through May 2022, regular licenses are 1/3 off and annual licenses 1/2 off, starting at only $5.00!

Available for Adobe Illustrator CC 2019 through 2022, Mac or Windows.

medical monitors

Auxiliary Projection panel

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.

Easier updates

Those of you who have had Graffix plugins for Adobe Illustrator for a while know that version updates and even new features are almost always free. In fact, every update since 2014 has been free, and although some significant updates are currently in progress, none are planned to require an additional payment.

When new features, improvements to existing features, or just addressing issues that occasionally arise, I like to get fixes and improvements in the hands of users as soon as practical.

update dialogOn the other hand, I realize that unzipping the download, then navigating through the file system to place the plugin in Illustrator’s Plug-ins folder is a hassle. Illustrators have too much to do to be saddled with busywork like this!

When I rebuilt my plugins using Hot Door’s CORE libraries in 2014, I was encouraged that it had built-in almost all the tools I needed to automatically install updates (key word: almost). A fellow developer recently alerted me to an approach that finally made the last piece of this process possible. Some of the plugins available for download now have the auto-install system added, and the rest of the plugins will be updated as well in the near future.

When the new plugins fetch an update, they will automatically install it, and move the “read-me” doc file to a “Graffix plugins” folder located in your Documents folder. I only wish I could have enabled this sooner!

IMPORTANT UPDATE: The auto-install, I found out too late, only works reliably on Mac systems, and then only when the Plug-ins folder has its permissions set to read/write for everybody. Current plugins test for the known limits and, if necessary, will send a link to your browser to download as it used to. If you’ve already downloaded a plugin with auto-install, you’ll have to manually download an update from the site. I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. Please remember, I’m just an illustrator like you who’s figured out how to write plugins, and that limited experience sometimes shows.

Using an auxiliary view in AxoTools

Update: Now with AxoTools 16.2, there’s an easier way!

step 1

Every technical illustrator, it seems, eventually runs into a situation where a surface they’re drawing doesn’t exactly match the top, left, or right views. If one edge of a rectangle that defines that surface coincides with the X or Z axis, there are at least two ways to project that angled face. Let’s say you want to add a dial or knob to this control panel.

In conventional drafting, you’d draw what’s called an auxiliary view for the tilted panel, then mathematically calculate the locations of the panel’s elements in the axonometric (or isometric) view. One way might be called the “rotate and force-fit” method.

Here’s a sequence of steps that shows how that works, and illustrates the reason those four “Rotate” and “Unrotate” items were added to the flyout menu.

step Astep B

Step Cstep D

Of course, the axis of the ellipse is at a different angle than any axis, so here’s a method that uses axonometric logic to reverse-engineer the projection of that surface in order to use the Extrude tool to accurately draw the cylindrical shape of the knob.

step 2step 3

step 4step 5

step 6step 7step 8step 9

step 10

After this technique, be sure to restore your axonometric projection to the previous settings!

New tools are currently in progress for AxoTools, but until they’re available, this should help you get through some of those unusual situations.

If you have other tips, please share!

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.

ToolShed adds Transform tool

One of my favorite tools in Adobe Illustrator is the Free Transform tool, but it does have a few quirks in more recent versions of Illustrator. Say you have a shape made of two rectangles, one of which is rotated 90° from the other, and both rotated some random small amount. With one rectangle selected while using Adobe’s Free Transform Tool, all is well.

Now select the second rectangle and the bounding box is no longer rotated with the selection.

With ToolShed’s new Transform tool, the bounding box is always rotated to match the topmost object, so you can transform these rectangles as though they were one object. One way around this would be to use the Square Up plugin to square the objects along their dominant axis, but that’s now an unnecessary step.

If you press the shift key while rotating, ToolShed’s Transform tool will rotate only the bounding box, which makes it easy to stretch your art along any angle you wish!

Using Adobe’s Free Transform tool, I often grab the handle on a side to stretch it a bit taller or wider, but then it goes all cattywompus. Using the Free Transform tool on more recent versions of Illustrator requires us to first lock proportions by clicking an icon in another tiny palette that, it seems, is always hidden behind other panels. In addition, grabbing a corner to rescale it often seems to rotate the art instead of scaling it. Ain’t nobody got time for that! ToolShed’s Transform tool doesn’t skew and doesn’t rotate from a corner, so for most purposes, you can work more quickly and with fewer surprises.

Remember, you can download ToolShed and try it out with a thousand trial uses that don’t expire before you have a chance to seriously test it. They don’t expire at all!

 

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