Illustrator (Desktop) Feature Requests
When entering a new feature request, please provide:
- Description
- Why is this valuable to you?
575 results found
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Blending live pie (ellipses) treats them as path and not like live shapes
Make an ellipse and set pie end angle to 5 degrees (press Invert button if neede to get thin pie)
Duplicate and offset it and change en angle to 270 (doesn't really matter).
Blend these. AI won't blend their shape properties, but blend them as paths. What's use of live shapes then, if AI can't handle them with basic tools?12 votes -
Scale Percentage to automatically tell you the Percent of Increase or Decrease in the Object's Size
Enhancing the Scale tool so that it automatically tells you the Percent of Increase or Decrease in the Objects Size. When scaling elements in Illustrator I cannot always select all and type in 10 inches and have it be what I need. In the attached Image I need the letter T to equal 10 inches in height and scale the other letters up accordingly. So I take the size of the "T" and now have to manually calculate the percent of increase from 4.691” to 10”.
With an improved Scaling Tool it would be nice to see what that percentage…
12 votes -
Ability to change starting point for closed path
Currently the only option is to cut and the path or redraw the path completely if the starting anchor is in the wrong place. For straight edges, such as a square or even a rectangle it's easy to work around, but when it's a curved edge it is difficult to replicate the same curve with the cut method. Could easily add this feature to stoke effect so that the starting point can be adjusted with a click on the anchor. Or have left and right arrows to move it to a different starting anchor (although that wouldn't work on things…
12 votes -
A hotkey to make the Free Transform tool only transform fill patterns.
When dragging with the Selection or Direct Selection tools, or using the Rotate, and Scale tools to transform an object, you can hold down ~ to only transform its pattern fill. But the Free Transform tool doesn’t do this. Can we get it to do this?
(As with the Rotate, Scale, and Selection tools, holding down the other modifier keys whole holding down ~ should act as they normally do with the Free Transform tool.)
There is a ‘transform pattern only’ option in the Transform panel’s menu, but that’s a lot of clicks far away from the thing you’re actively…
12 votes -
Make Spiral as a live shape, editable after it has been drawn
It could be useful to have an option for adding segments, or changing decay, especially if it serves as a path for text.
12 votes -
Archimedean Spirals
Surely this should just be a default option for spiral drawing, in the current state of design i would imagine regular spirals would be used far more often than logarithmic, the current way to create them is lengthy and cumbersome.
Hope this makes it!12 votes -
Add Transform Again Individually / Transform Sequence Again / Sequence Again Individually commands, as in InDesign
Illustrator has Transform Again command (and it’s rather useful), but InDesign has three additional commands:
Transform Again Individually:
Applies the last single transform operation to each selected object individually, rather than as a group.Transform Sequence Again:
Applies the last sequence of transform operations to the selection.Transform Sequence Again Individually:
Applies the last sequence of transform operations to each selected object individually.
As described here: https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/transforming-objects.html#repeat_transformations
Here is a video demonstrating the difference between these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4gLe9LeRKI
Sure, we have Transform Each as a workaround, but it doesn’t support custom pivots as tools do, and these are just faster.
If…
11 votes -
Hitting Escape while creating a shape, an artboard, while using Rotate, Scale, etc., doesn't cancel the process
When we marquee a selection and hit Escape — it gets canceled.
When we hit Escape while dragging out a guide — it gets canceled.
Dragging out a brush on the canvas — works.
Dragging out a swatch to drop it on a gradient or the canvas — works.
Dragging the appearance form the Appearance panel — works.
...and many other casesEscape does NOT work for these cases:
1. Creating a shape, an artboard, an area text
2. Rotating, scaling, shearing, free transforming...
3. Setting up the width with the Width tool
4. Setting up the gradient with the…11 votes -
Make Pen and Scissors tools prioritize editing to a selected path
Am I missing something? can the pen and scissors tool prioritize editing to the selected path? If I'm editing a path behind another path it is often a complete guessing game when I'm trying to edit a selected path if it is anywhere near the top path.
I just don't understand why anybody would find it useful that a selected path would be ignored for another overlapping path when using the pen or scissors tools11 votes -
3 points arc creation tool (as a live shape)
Arcs and 'pie' shapes created from the center point and specifying the start and end angles that remain 'live' after creation.
Same as in CorelDraw!... been using Illustrator for 15 years had to revert to Corel for this feature.11 votes -
flip horizontal and flip vertical from contextual menu
Please add "flip vertical" and "flip horizontal" to the "Transform..." contextual menu pop-up in Illustrator. We have this function in Animate already. It would improve workflow and is something that should be relatively easy to program. Thank you for all your hard work improving Illustrator.
11 votes -
Add CAD path creation/modification tools
Some wonderful tools that would help are Trim, Extend, and Corner tools.
Trim allows you to stop a line at another line. So if you drew a + you could trim the top to the - and make a T.
Extend does the opposite. It makes a line longer until it hits a target line. It turns |- into a T (rotated).
Corner tool trims or extends two lines as need to make a corner. |- becomes L by clicking both lines.
Look to AutoCad or Revit for examples.
11 votes -
Restrict Pan to work only Horizontally / Vertically with a Shift modifier
I'd love if there was a key we could hold down to restrict the hand tool to only pan perfectly vertical or horizontal. Would make it easier to develop for web — you could quickly get a sense of how a site would work when the user scrolls.
11 votes -
Chained dimensions
New Dimension tool is designed to be good-enough, but not be way too complex to setup and use.
One of things we need to be a part of this 'good-enough' set of features it has should be a way to create consequential serialized dimensions, like the image attached demonstrates.
To do that now, we’d have to drag each segment one-by-one, and snap the dimensions line to each other (which in the current build just doesn’t happen even!). This method is generates doubled lines instead of only one, and won’t allow us to move all the dimension lines at once if…
10 votes -
Change the cursor for Artboard Tool when a click is going to create a new object-sized artboard
When using Artboard Tool, you can do several things with a simple click.
1. Select an artboard under the cursor
2. Deselect an artboard if there is no artboards under the cursor
3. Create an artboard which size is the same as the object you click — but ONLY if the object is inside of the already selected artboard OR if the place you click is not inside of any artboard.This #3 case prevents deselecting artboards efficiently in cases when you don’t have 'naked canvas' inside of the viewport. And clicking is the only way to deselect artboards, since…
10 votes -
Create a shortcut to toggle between 2 different tools (e.g. brush & ink)
Would be nice to have a keyboard shortcut to toggle between 2 tools (e.g. brush and ink) I'm working on an illustration and would be so much faster if I could have just one key to toggle between both tools. This is possible in Photoshop. I don't understand why isn't possible in Adobe Illustrator :(
10 votes -
Same functionalities as shown here in the subscribe tool
https://astutegraphics.com/software/subscribe/
Basically the 'Circle by Points Tool' in Subscribe should be a functionality added to the Ellipse Tool. And the 'Arch by Points Tool' in Subscribe should be a functionality added to the 'Line Segment Tool' in Ai as well. These are common functions in in cad programs and need to be added to Illustrator natively to improve vector building.10 votes -
Chart tool: overriding value axis
The chart tool breaks when trying to override the axis values when the data numbers are too large. I think it's for any numbers over 1,000,000 but it might be lower (I have not explored it that much.) Checking the override tick box will set the maximum number to 2147483 (maybe that is the number it breaks at) and will skew the chart badly.
10 votes
Anish Kumar
responded
Hi Wes,
Thanks for explanation. I got it. This is a feature request, so I am moving this thread to feature request section.
Thanks
Anish -
Create folders for brushes
Can we get the ability to create folders for brushes?
I would like to be able to group my brushes by length, width, style, color, etc. As it is now, I have to wait for the tooltip to show up before I know whether my brush is a medium, short, long stroke...
10 votes -
Better join segments tool
There are instances (mostly when cleaning up DXF files from 3D models) were there are a lot of broken line segments. It would be great if there were options for the join command to join multiple line segments that are within a certain distance and tangent angle to each other. It would then take multiple separate line segments and join them into one clean and continuous line.
Maybe there would also be a preview ability that would recolor\highlight the lines that would be joined and then allow you to adjust the distance and angle until you get the desired result.
…
10 votes
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