How to join shapes

[Zaughtilo]

Trying to make outline of a face. made half of it, duped that and flipped it horizontally then moved it over so it makes a symmetrical face. but its in two shapes now and the join curves tool doesnt do anything at all. heres a screen shot. how do I make these 2 shapes one

[R C-R]

You can only join open shapes, so if the two halves include the vertical line segments along what would be the centerline of the face, you need to break each of them at their top & bottom nodes & discard the verticals, then select & join the two remaining curves. Alternately, use the boolean Add to combine them into a single shape.

 

EDIT: Be aware of a bug in the boolean operations that can drive you crazy if you don't notice it. As shown below, even if you use snapping to precisely align the end points of a flipped copy with those of the original, using the boolean Add operation may combine some co-located nodes but not others, resulting in pairs of sharp nodes where one smooth node would be expected. The only indication you are likely to see that this has happened at normal zoom levels is what appears to be a single square node symbol where a round one would be expected. Zooming in to extreme levels, like in the inset, will show there are actually two sharp nodes very close to each other.

You can avoid this using the Join Curves action. Because you cannot choose which nodes are joined & only the two nearest ones will be joined, something like in the second row above produces more predictable results, where the shape is finished off with the Close Curve action.

 

Also note that both methods reveal another bug: both adding & joining curves will often increase the stroke width for no apparent reason. This is easier to see in the attached .afdesign file, where the initial 4 px wide strokes become 5.66 px wide ones after adding/joining them into one shape.

face flip.afdesign

[Grazie]

7 hours ago, R C-R said:

Also note that both methods reveal another bug: both adding & joining curves will often increase the stroke width for no apparent reason.

 

Ha! Thanks for saying that, been driving me bonkers....

[R C-R]

28 minutes ago, Grazie said:

8 hours ago, R C-R said:

Also note that both methods reveal another bug: both adding & joining curves will often increase the stroke width for no apparent reason.

 

Ha! Thanks for saying that, been driving me bonkers....

I am not sure but this bug seems to be triggered by the "Scale with object" stroke option -- if both curves are set to use that option then the stroke width is increased; otherwise not. With both curves set to scaled strokes, the distance between their joined nodes determines how much the stroke width increases, with greater distances increasing width more than if they are close to each other.

 

I hope this is not by design, but only the developers can say if it is or not.

[Zaughtilo]

Thanks. Used break curve tool so that it would let me delete nodes without automatically re-closing itself. Like you said, once the two curves were just the face and didn't have the middle and top lines, it let me connect.

[jer]

On 8/19/2017 at 9:55 PM, R C-R said:

You can only join open shapes, so if the two halves include the vertical line segments along what would be the centerline of the face, you need to break each of them at their top & bottom nodes & discard the verticals, then select & join the two remaining curves. Alternately, use the boolean Add to combine them into a single shape.

EDIT: Be aware of a bug in the boolean operations that can drive you crazy if you don't notice it. As shown below...

 

Ouch! This was painful for over an hour as I kept fiddling with it, knowing it is supposed to work! Glad I finally decided to do a Forum search and, sure enough, R C-R  has thoroughly described the solution and (all the) related bug issues. @R C-R, Thanks!  

[Must be open shapes - - Argggh!]

[ADD isn't the best method - yes, but it is the most intuitive! - - Double Argggh!]