Joining two paths completely ruins brush width/variable stroke width profiles
- Draw a path with a pressure-sensitive brush. Draw another one that begins near where the first one ends.
- Select the ends of both paths. Object > Join.
Wonder why the resulting pressure profile bears no resemblance to what you had on screen before the join.
Draw a path with a variable stroke width. Draw another one that begins near where the first one ends.
Select the ends of both paths. Object > Join.
Wonder why the resulting width profile bears no resemblance to what you had on screen before the join.
I think it might be just grabbing the pressure/width profiles from the topmost stroke and applying that to the entire joined path. Which is not what I think anyone would expect, I feel like the expected behavior is that a new stroke has a pressure/width profile generated by appending the first path's profile to the second.
I'm super surprised there isn't an entry for this in UserVoice that I can find. Maybe I'm just no good at searching this thing. Maybe there's a ton of bug reports in the old bug database from before uservoice. Remember that thing? Where it was just a form on Adobe's site that you could type stuff into with no idea if anyone ever saw it? Wikipedia tells me UserVoice launched in 2008, two years before variable-width strokes were introduced in 2010, but I dunno when Adobe started using it. And of course this behavior has existed for pressure-sensitive brushes since 1998 when brushes were first introduced back in Illustrator 8. I dunno when the Join tool first appeared, I started with Illustrator 8 and I assume it goes back to like v1 or 2.
Anyway. Now there's a bug for this. I wrote it up because a new user just asked what they assumed was an incredibly stupid noob question on the Illustrator subreddit and I got to tell them that no, they're not missing a weird corner of the docs, Illustrator just bungles this incredibly basic operation because Adobe has had zero attention to detail for twenty-seven years.
Margaret Trauth
shared this idea
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There are two related entries:
1. Scissors tool should be aware of stroke width profiles and brush tool data (yours) — http://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657/suggestions/44457144
2. Width tool messes up the width points when a path is extended / shortened / cut — http://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657/suggestions/35891749
