Hi. I feel like a complete idiot right now. I’ve taken courses in AI but for some reason, I’ve lost my marbles. My husband drew out an SVG. It’s a basically a bunch of shapes that combine to make a picture - a mosaic, a puzzle: whatever. The pieces fit nicely together. But I changed one of the central pieces a bit, and now I can’t get the paths to line up. I spent a good part of yesterday getting one piece to line up against another (adding anchor points and manipulating them with the direct selection tool). It took longer than it should have. I had a thought falling asleep last night that the shape builder tool would be able to help me. It made sense to my befuddled brain at the time, but now I’m wide-awake and clueless. Any advice?
Please ignore the atrocious colors. I used them so I could more easily see the paths to line them up, overlapping them perfectly. The blue, red, and yellow shape need to fit smoothly against each other. There’s a lot more to the svg than just these three pieces, but it was the least complicated to show. I know there has to be an easier way to do this than tediously moving each anchor point back and freaking forth.
OH! Probably important to note- I can’t combine them with a shared, single line. I need to be able to pull each shape out of the file and cut them separately.
Somebody with skill in AI will pop in with better advice, but in the meantime:
If I need an exact match, instead of moving each node individually I make a copy of the other piece and separate out the line I want to copy and then attach that to the original piece. Yes it’s still a few steps, but WAY faster than node editing!
You might be able to delete the offending piece, put a big shape underneath the empty area, and use pathfinder and the other pieces to cut it out. Not sure if I successfully translated what’s in my head to words. Did that make any sense?
Then I move the blue shape behind all of the others and used Pathfinder Trim to snip it out. After removing the fill and adding back the strokes that Trim deleted, I’m left with the missing shape (I moved it out of the way here to make it possible to see it):
Note that it wasn’t perfect, but it would be easy to trim those little extra lines off.
I found I had to experiment with a bunch of different pathfinder tools to find the one that worked - that’s usually the case, it’s hard to keep their exact functions in your head.
Or here’s one that’s 1000 times easier, like you said just use the shape builder tool. Same idea, start with a hole in the middle where the new shape should go.
Without seeing the rest of the composition I’d say your falling asleep brain was right - Shapebuilder would handle this easily. You have to select all the shapes before invoking the tool to be most effective.
Oh my goodness. This is the exact way I adjusted the central piece in the first place. It didn’t even occur to me to try it for all these outside pieces since it was then the inverse. Thank you so much!!!
