Margaret Trauth
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14 votes2 comments · Illustrator (Desktop) Feature Requests » User Interface · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →
An error occurred while saving the comment An error occurred while saving the comment Margaret Trauth
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I draw comics, and use Graphic Styles to keep my characters consistent across panels and pages.
A simple character might involve a half dozen styles. A complicated character can involve a lot more - see the attached screenshot.
Add in a good chunk of Graphic Styles for recurring background elements and I'm constantly dealing with triple-digit number of entries in the Graphic Styles palette. Finding the set of styles I want to use becomes an increasingly tedious process as pages get more complicated.
I would like to be able to create folders of Graphic Styles, which I can open and close in a similar fashion to opening and closing layers.
Being able to nest them would be nice; in the attached screenshot I have styles for two variants of a character's vehicle, with their own subsets of styles for drawing them at different sizes. Being able to nest all of these into "KIRT MECH" would be great for when I'm working on a page involving three giant robots fighting.
I would also really really love it if these folders were preserved when pulling styles out of a style library, or when copying art to another file.
Basically I have been using a LOT OF Graphic Styles to make some pretty complicated artwork, and I am finding myself direly in need of a way to fold away the parts of the complexity I'm not thinking about at the moment.
Margaret Trauth
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2 votes1 comment · Illustrator (Desktop) Feature Requests » Brushes · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →
An error occurred while saving the comment Margaret Trauth
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It is 2022 and I have finally found a workaround for this wherein I don't use Illustrator's scatter brushes at all; instead I use Astute's Dynamic Sketch plugin to draw paths with variable widths, and their Symbol Stipple plugin to turn those paths into a bunch of randomly-placed shapes. It is kind of awkward to set up but it does work and it sure would be nice if there was a simple "scatter magnitude" slider in the native scatter brush settings.
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5 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Margaret Trauth
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Still here in 26.3.1. I use this a lot for Op Art trickery and it's pretty annoying to have it broken.
An error occurred while saving the comment Margaret Trauth
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I updated, it's still there on 26.2.1.
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1 vote0 comments · Illustrator (Desktop) Bugs » File Save, Import and Export · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →Margaret Trauth
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2 votes0 comments · Illustrator (Desktop) Feature Requests » Clipping · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →Margaret Trauth
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1 vote
An error occurred while saving the comment Margaret Trauth
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Hmm, 23.1.1 (2019) and 22.1.0 (2018) are doing the same thing. So if it's a reversion it's been around a while, I guess this is more of an enhancement request after all - feel free to move this to the appropriate place, o moderators.
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4 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Margaret Trauth
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I have wanted this so long. You have my upvote.
Egor does make the valid point that it could cause an infinite number of pattern steps if you made the width too thin, there should probably be a minimum pattern size failsafe lurking in the revised pattern brush renderer.
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Also here is a negative spacing workaround for pattern brushes that I use regularly:
1. draw the art to be the pattern brush
2. draw a rectangle with no stroke or fill that is smaller than the art, place it behind the brush art
3. make this art into a pattern brush or alt-drag it into the thumbnails of an existing pattern brush in the brush palette.You can also take an existing pattern brush, drag it onto the artboard, edit the invisible bounding boxes that come along with it, and alt-drag them back into the brush's thumbnails.
Depending on the precise pattern you could also just make a scatter brush the default settings except for a spacing <100.
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2 votes4 comments · Illustrator (Desktop) Bugs » File Save, Import and Export · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →
An error occurred while saving the comment Margaret Trauth
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OKAY so this seems to have ended up being a bug with Astute's WidthScribe plugin, they just released a beta update and this has stopped happening.
Sorry to have blamed Adobe, this one showed up after I updated AI, and was happening on files that weren't even using any of WidthScribe's effects! :)
An error occurred while saving the comment Margaret Trauth
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The mysterious change seems to be the addition of four paths, and a group containing one path, to the topmost layer, immediately upon opening the file. These paths do not seem to exist in any meaningful form - I can't see anything when I select them, even if I zoom out past the entire pasteboard; if I turn on "zoom to selection" and try zooming in, the preview doesn't move from wherever I happen to have it centered.
This file contains nothing but these paths. If you delete them, save, and reload, they won't reappear.
An error occurred while saving the comment Margaret Trauth
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Here's a file that I spent a little time deleting stuff out of until it stopped doing this. This is the last version that does it; if I unlock the single layer and save a new file, the new file will not be marked as changed when I load it back in until I actually change something. But this file? Instantly marked as edited the moment it's opened.
An error occurred while saving the comment Margaret Trauth
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Here's another one that's doing this for me. It's super simple, just a few layers with some stuff sketched with the Pencil tool, and some translucent shapes with Gaussian Blurs on them to rough in some lighting.
Interestingly enough if I delete the layer with those blurred shapes and save this as a new file, it's still showing up as edited the moment I load it in.
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4 votesMargaret Trauth
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2 votes1 comment · Illustrator (Desktop) Feature Requests » Brushes · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →Margaret Trauth
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67 votes20 comments · Illustrator (Desktop) Feature Requests » Strokes · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →Margaret Trauth
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6 votes3 comments · Illustrator (Desktop) Feature Requests » Other... · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →
An error occurred while saving the comment Margaret Trauth
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I think the "Better Keyboard Shortcut Customization" idea merged with this one might have been more about menu shortcuts than toolbar shortcuts? Not sure, it's vanished now.
Anyway. I've got a lot of shortcuts. I think I've got about fifteen key combinations that aren't assigned to something - plain key for a tool, shifted key for another tool, command-key, command-shift-key, command-alt-key, and command-alt-shift-key for various menu items and the tiny intersection between "stuff in the various panels I'd like to have a hotkey for" and "stuff that actually shows up in the Keyboard Shortcut dialog".
As a Mac user I'd love to be able to add the control key to the mix, doubling the number of shortcuts I can assign. I never use Windows so I don't care what you figure out to give Windows users another bit for key shortcuts - maybe the Windows key?
Also there are some things wired deeply into Illustrator that should be changeable. Most notably the shortcut of holding down the ` key while using most transformation tools to only transform pattern swatches; it's unchangeable, and doesn't *exist* on all international keyboards.
Really I would like to see every single button and menu item in Illustrator's myriad palettes show up in the Keyboard Shortcuts pane. I can get around some things not showing up in there *if* they'll show up in actions, but some won't - I'm so **** tired of having to go to the Appearance palette's menu to do "Redefine Graphic Style" in my graphic-style-oriented workflow, for instance.
I've seen screenshots of other Adobe tools that have much nicer keyboard shortcut editors, that do things like show you which keys are still unassigned. Look at them. Steal liberally from them. Expose a ton more things to control by the keyboard. And give us a couple more bits worth of meta keys.
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2 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment Margaret Trauth
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I'm glad to know I'm not the only one Egor, I'm working on a piece that's giving the view rotation a serious workout and this is really driving me nuts.
An error occurred while saving the comment Margaret Trauth
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Dragging out a marquee with the Zoom tool does this, too. So does the Group Selection tool, and so does Astute's Super Marquee. I really hope this is because they are all relying on the same "Draw Selection Marquee" routine. :)
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2 votes0 comments · Illustrator (Desktop) Feature Requests » File Save, Import and Export · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →Margaret Trauth
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3 votes0 comments · Illustrator (Desktop) Feature Requests » Strokes · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →Margaret Trauth
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1 vote
An error occurred while saving the comment Margaret Trauth
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This is still happening. It's been happening for several years before I filed this bug. It didn't used to happen. I can't remember which release introduced this behavior. It was whatever release "helpfully" started making the portions of clipped paths that are outside the clipping mask be inactive. I hated it then. I still hate it. It constantly trips me up when I am working with shapes drawn over clipping masks. Which I do pretty often.
Seriously I really hate this behavior. If you are an engineer at Adobe looking for a small thing to try and play with, and spend a day or two fiddling with this, even if you determine that this is a huger problem than it appears, please contact me and I will send you money to buy a beer, or do a small piece of art for you, or something, because you will be poking at something that has been a low-level constant annoyance in my workflow for several *years*.
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5 votesMargaret Trauth
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1 vote2 comments · Illustrator (Desktop) Bugs » Rendering Issues (GPU, CPU) · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →
An error occurred while saving the comment Margaret Trauth
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Hmm, good point, Egor - here's a couple of screengrabs. They're both absolutely identical but for the rendering method. I've included the result of overlaying them in "difference" mode as well, mostly because I wanted to see just how far apart they were.
This is on 25.4.1, on a 2017 Macbook Pro. (2.5 GHz Intel Core i7, Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 1536 MB according to About This Mac. Still on Mojave because I'm not saying goodbye to Neko, the Desktop Cat until I absolutely have to upgrade because I bought a new computer.)
Also thanks! :)
(and yeah, I probably should make a separate bug for area type autosize turning itself off, I just noticed it happening while isolating the test case for this one.)
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9 votes2 comments · Illustrator (Desktop) Feature Requests » Brushes · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →
An error occurred while saving the comment Margaret Trauth
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To expand on this:
Illustrator's brush engine stores no less than FIVE sets of data from the stylus on brushed paths - pressure, stylus wheel, tilt, bearing, and rotation. But there is no way to edit this. You have to get all of these variables perfect in one brush stroke, or redraw it from scratch.
The Width tool, meanwhile, applies a completely DIFFERENT set of data, and does not work on some brushed paths - scatter, calligraphic, and bristle brushes.
I should be able to brush a path, then go back in with the Width tool and edit ALL of those sets of data. Pressure, stylus wheel, tilt, bearing, and rotation.
Coming up with a UI for all of these is admittedly a challenge - how do we indicate these five different profiles? Do we show them all at once? Do we have a key to change which one is being shown? My initial thought is that showing one at a time eliminates the problem of figuring out a way to easily add a point in any of those profiles.
But at the very least, yeah: if you use the Width Tool on a calligraphic/scatter/bristle brush, it should be affecting the existing pressure profile. Really that's what it should have been doing all along with *every* stroke instead of adding width profiles on top of pressure/etc profiles, IMHO...
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25.4.1 is available in Creative Cloud but the What's New section of the user guide only covers 25.3. 2 votesMargaret Trauth
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Hi. I still could really really need this. Please?
I'm doing a comic right now that has sets of styles for two characters, plus an outfit variant for each of them, and a second outfit for one, plus an assortment of styles for the backgrounds, and my Styles palette is just stupidly gigantic. They make it super easy to draw a character quickly but scrolling through them takes an absurd amount of time and thought, I wanna be able to say "okay I am drawing Chloe in the dance costume so I need to open up the base folder and the dance outfit folder" and close everything else so I'm not trying to remember where everything is in this roughly sixty-inch-tall palette.
Just imagine that every blank style in my screenshot with a name like " CHARACTER NAME" is a folder, that has a disclosure triangle next to it so I can open it and close it. Being able to nest style folders would be super nice, I could just say "Okay time to draw Chloe" and have all her alternate outfits lurking under her base styles, then finish drawing her and hide them all away with one click. But if that's too complicated, just having folders at all would be a MAJOR boost.