David
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Repost from here: https://community.adobe.com/t5/illustrator-discussions/remove-overlapping-anchor-points-remove-doubles/m-p/13648873#M359691
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I oftentimes round corners or merge shapes together only to end up with a shape that looks nice but has horrible topology with overlapping anchor points. This makes adjusting bezier curves on these points impossible since the bezier handles are split up.
[IMG 1]
Blender 3D's solution is called "merge points by distance" or "remove doubles" which is used to reduce the vertex count which makes it easier to manipulate a model.
Let's say we have a 5-spoked star in Ilustrator and for some reason end up moving 4 anchor points of the right half on top of the anchor point at the top. You now have a nice half star silhouette with terrible topology since it icludes a corner with 5 overlapping anchor points. A simple "remove doubles" command would merge every anchor point on the canvas or selection that is closer than 0.000001 px or something like that, leaving you with the half star and no more overlapping points.
[IMG 2]
Yes, I know that you can just delete the 4 anchor points to get clean topology for the star, or put a rectangle over it and use the shape builder tool, but what do you do when you have a complex design with hundreds of curves that need to be merged and worked on afterwards?
The current workarounds are all terrible. Pathfinder doesn't remove anchor point duplicates and slightly alters the shape by 0.X pixels which ends up messing with alignments. Simplify Path redraws a new path which alters the shape and gives you no control over the anchor points and curves. Offset Path also alters the shape, either shrinking or enlarging it. CTRL+J only connects lose anchor points into a unified path, so it's not doing anything to help in this case.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCcV99wa07U
Blender 3D had this feature for a long time and it's really frustrating to not see it in a 2D vector application like Illustrator. On top of that, removing doubles should also carry both halves of the bezier handles over to the newly merged anchor point.
David
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16 votesDavid
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Since I cannot edit the post: IMG 1 is the one with the emoji, IMG 2 is the one with the star