Love hate - Illustrator madness

[Sean_Savanah@adobeforums.com]

I open Illustrator, start a new file and proceed with my detailed illustration - 10 minutes in I realise the power of the program and enjoy using it. 20 minutes in I am forced to take a break as my frustrations go beyond control.

What is with Illustrator's need for absolute mouse control when selecting a handle of a besier curve, if you miss by a fraction of a millimeter the line is deselected - turn on Smart Guides, sure, you can now select the handle more easily but now it locks to 45 degrees. if a line is selected surely it should be prioritised - all actions relate to that line, no other.

Another - draw 2 boxes - there appears to be no way to grab one anchor point of one box and drag it to the other box to snap to its anchor point - you have to use the hollow arrow, select all corner points then drag - if you use the solid select arrow you cannot click on a corner - madness - Please tell me I have overlooked something - after 10 years of using the software every day I would have thought I would have found it by now.

[Dee Holmes]

Sorry, I'm not really clear on what you are trying to do.

I know that in the Preferences dialog box under smart guides there's snap tolerance settings and different angle settings.

Are you just not getting used to the way direct selection tool and selection tools work? Do you have edges and bounding box showing?

Maybe you can give me another example of what you're trying to explain.

By the way, I'm not using AICS. I have Windows AI9 and OS9.2.2 AI10.03. What are you running?

[Wade_Zimmerman@adobeforums.com]

I think I know what is causing these problems go to this link perhaps it will shed some light on things:

T. C. "can we do motion in PS css?" 5/8/04 8:18pm </cgi-bin/webx?14@@.3bb3f634/14>

[Scott_Weichert@adobeforums.com]

The size and particularness of the nodes has been addressed quite a bit recently. hopefully Adobe will improve them in the next release.

As for your second issue Sean, you've baffled me. You dont' want to use the direct select tool.... you don't want to use the select tool. What exactly is it you want to do? The direct select tool allows you to select just one corner of a rectangle and drag it if you want.

[Dee Holmes]

You see, I have a very hard time with decifering what anyone is trying to desplay in type and what they are trying to accomplish.

That is why I ask silly questions like I do to get more information.

It's easy if you can actually see what someone's trying to do, then explain it to them how to do it.

I'm working on these skills - so sorry for the weirdness.

[lee_vickers@adobeforums.com]

I don't want to patronise you Sean, as you say you have much experience; alt + hollow arrow selects all the nodes of a shape, or select the centre-point of the square (if you have that enabled).

[hitpawz@adobeforums.com]

You can also use the direct select tool to click directly in the fill area to select the entire object (must be activated in preferences).

Keep clicking with OPTION and the direct select tool to grab the groups. There's no need for the select tool (black arrow) ever unless you want to use the bounding box to scale or rotate.

About the required precision of selecting and moving points, yes that's hard to get used to. Almost 8 years since I started using Illustrator and I still miss points and have to go back. How about if they added a hotkey that you could hold that would let you move and do things to everything that you have selected without actually having to click on that item again. Maybe " ~ " Then you just hold that down and it doesn't matter where you start your operation from, it affects the selected objects. Probably a feature request that nobody would care too much about.