From the course: Learning Astute Graphics for Illustrator

Fix broken paths - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Learning Astute Graphics for Illustrator

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Fix broken paths

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- [Instructor] In this movie, we'll take a look at how to use the Rejoin Paths feature in Vector First Aid. A common problem you may encounter when you work with stock art or CAD drawings brought into Illustrator is artwork that's broken into many small paths. It makes editing the artwork tedious at best and nearly impossible in other cases. Our file here is a good example. This started out as a CAD drawing, and while it looks very clean and precise, watch what happens if I click and drag any part of it with the Selection Tool. Every little detail is its own separate path. I'll undo three times to put those paths back where they were, and I can see exactly how many paths are in this file by choosing Window, Document Info, and from the panel menu, I'll make sure that Objects is selected. And I'll Select All in my file, and I can see that there are currently 391 paths total. So let's reduce that number to something more usable, and there are a few ways I could go. First, I could just click the Quick Fix button to rejoin paths right here, or I can hold down the Option or Alt key and then click this button, and that's what I'll do. This brings up a dialog box with a tolerance value that I can change, plus options to rejoin paths with different styles, different directions, and variable width strokes. Increasing the tolerance value will increase the number of paths that are joined and make the artwork simpler. Just be aware that high tolerance values can distort the artwork because you're connecting points that aren't very close together. Notice how the default value is set to just 1/10 of a point. But if I increase it to something very large like six points and click OK, I can see that my artwork gets messed up in some places. So let's undo that, and this time I'll just click the Quick Fix button and use the default tolerance value of 1/10 of a point. The fix is instant, and the panel tells me at the bottom that 264 paths were rejoined. And Illustrator confirms this in the Document Info panel, where I now have just 127 paths to work with. So with one click, I reduced the number of paths to 1/3 of what I started with. And if I click and drag, I can see this is now one object, and so is this one at the bottom. And these would be a lot nicer to work with than all those separate paths. But notice this area in the middle is not a closed path. That's because there was only one path at the top and at the bottom. And those paths were used in these two objects. So it's important to understand that Vector First Aid isn't going to make up new paths, it's only going to use ones that already exist in your file. It's also important to understand that in some cases, you might get better results by rejoining paths in a selection, rather than the entire file. So to get the most out of the Rejoin Paths feature in Vector First Aid, experiment with different tolerance values, and by running the command on a selection of paths, rather than your whole file. When you find the right balance, you can make CAD drawings and other complex artwork much easier to work with.

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