Hacking Illustrator (and CorelDraw) to make dashed lines for folding/tearing

As I started doing this I thought… why would we even mess with dashed score lines on a laser for paper folding?! I had to use them on my Silhouette, so I got really good at designing them in Illustrator with all of the above ways. I loathe them because the folds are never perfectly clean. I wouldn’t bother with them… just do a quick trace of the solid lines and then draw new solid lines in place of the dashed ones and set them to score. It’s going to look better and fold smoothly. I apologize if I am here a year later again and someone mentioned it in one of the 160 posts above and I look like THAT guy… I tried to skim it. lol

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I’m not giving you your beer back until you show me autotrace settings that accurately reproduced a series of circles as actual circles. :wink:

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They are ovals though… if you look closely. So your ovals were supposed to be ovals. lol

Now, gimme my beer. lol

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Have a cold one!

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Dang. Has his own custom wetsuit for the longneck. We love longnecks.

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Yay thread resurrection! I’ve recently been forced into Illustrator and found that, unlike Inkscape, there is no Combine/Break Apart that I can find.

Inkscape: For example, make your stroke dashed, use Path>Break Apart and it will make lots of tiny dashed lines, not tiny rectangles. Path>Combine will make all selected bits one object without trying to close a shape like Path>Union does. EDIT {I don’t know what happened, but this no longer works for me. I think it is because I installed Illustrator and they might use some of the same computer bits. Incredibly aggravating, as a project that should have taken 2 minutes ended up taking 30 minutes+ after I found this no longer worked for me. meh}

If you were to outline a fat stroke on a shape, Path>Break apart (2 shapes) ungroup and delete the center shape, you basically did an outset without the sometimes funky-ness.

Sometimes GFUI doesn’t like lots of groups. If the bits are all one setting (cut, score, engrave) you can Combine them and GFUI is much happier.

So, need dashed lines? Do it in Inkscape.

If anyone knows an equivalent to Combine/Break Apart for Illustrator, I’d love to hear it! As it is, I think that Inkscape might actually be more similar to Corel Draw than Illustrator!

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Thanks! I saw that and think it is rather clever, but it isn’t a replacement of the Combine and Break Apart Inkscape tools. After a bit more futzing, I found that you can use “Release Compound Path” to break out the center and delete it for the outset example above. Yay! But that doesn’t work with the dashed line :sweat_smile: