Saturday, July 12, 2008

On the Subject of Illustrator

If you have ever made a table made of threaded text boxes, you know it is a pain in the ass to select some of them. Dragging a cursor-select-frame (whatever it's called; in Photoshop it's the marquee) selects all the threaded text frames, not just the ones you want. De-selecting them is stupid and takes forever.

The solution is, once you get the right text in the right boxes, remove the threading completely (Type > Text Thread > Remove Threading). What you think will happen (ie, what would happen in InDesign, where text threading is the bread and butter) does NOT happen: the text in all but the first box does not disappear. What happens is all the text stays right where it should, which makes moving only selected boxes suddenly very easy.

So what do you called software behavior that is both non-obvious and inconsistent with expectations? Answer: Adobe!

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