Show/Hide Edges

Sometimes you have reason to hide the points of your object.  Maybe you’re making changes to your stroke width, maybe you’re adding a subtle effect, maybe you just find the selection color to be distracting.

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Posted in General, Tips at July 11th, 2010. No Comments.

Show/Hide Bounding Box

The bounding box is the part of the move tool (V, the black arrow) that allows you to resize your entire object as opposed to one point at a time.  It can get turned off by mistake sometimes leaving you wondering why you can’t resize objects.

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Posted in General, Tips at July 11th, 2010. No Comments.

Fill in the counters on live text

Here’s another post drawing on the strength of the Appearance Panel (previously explained here, here and here)  This one to help you automagically fill in or close the counters on live text.

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Posted in General, Tutorials at May 29th, 2010. No Comments.

Embroidered Text Effect

For this to make sense, you might want to refer back to the previous posts on the Appearance Panel.

Once you’ve read over those 3 posts, download this file and have at it.  You might like to adjust the stroke some to make the “holes” a bit more realistic.

This is live editable text, made awesome, by the appearance panel.

Posted in General, Tutorials at May 11th, 2010. No Comments.

Cleaning your font cache.

Another maintenance post. Another issue that can show itself in a few ways.

  • If you are unable to get Illustrator to boot and see that Illustrator is crashing as it shows “loading fonts”.
  • If your font list becomes filled with font names that look like they are combinations of other font names.
  • Other weirdness with the behavior of your fonts.

The font caches are temp files that both your computer and Illustrator cooks up to keep track of what fonts are active and where they are located. There is no danger in deleting them, they will be recreated the next time you restart Illustrator in the case of the application level caches or by the finder in the case of the system level caches. Office also creates its own, which behave the same way, but, well, for Office.

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Posted in General, Links, Tips at May 4th, 2010. No Comments.