How to combine rectangles?

click add-to-shape, then expand




....or, click Alt-Add to Shape to expand on the fly.

Bert

Thank you two so much for your quick and gentle help. That did the trick!

One issue that accrued while playing around with paths and the pen tool (Is this the english name for it? It's the one that looks like the tip of a fountain pen.)
I discovered something that seems like a bug to me. When I tell Illustrator to align objects to the grid the pen tool does not work anymore. When I click onto an anchor point, Illustrator raises an error stating "Anchor point cannot be deleted. Please use the anchorpoint-deletion-tool only with anchor points of a path" (my translation). Disabling grid alignment and clicking exactly the same spot as before removes the anchor point without error.

Why does grid alignment affect anchor point behavior?

If the point in question is not on a grid line, but close enough to be in the "snap zone," it could be that your click is effectively being executed on, (snapping-to), the nearby grid line rather than exactly where you've got the cursor, making your click a "miss."

Thanks, John.

This might be true. Although I almost never draw without grid alignment enabled I experienced some problems with that grid alignment feature. Sometimes points do not come to lie exactly on a grid point, and on other occasions I have rectangles whose bottom or right edges are not correctly aligned (and won't ever snap correctly to the grid).

Probably I'm doing something wrong but I do not have a clue what that might be.

Best wishes, Malte.