Trace and fill

[jackamus]

As a technical illustrator I'm find that AD is a very good package for doing technical illustrations.

 

As I draw each component, which can be made up of many 'Converted to curves' object and unconnected nodes, I have to fiddle around either creating partial white fills or cutting out hidden lines so that one component can sit on top of another.

 

May I suggest a feature that would be incredibly useful when doing exploded illustrations is for AD to automatically trace round the outline of the component, without a stroke thickness and to 'Fill' with whatever fill is required - in my case it would usually be white.

 

The attached file shows varying cut lines and fills to achieve the successful overlapping.

If you try moving or grouping any of the components to overlap other components you will see what the problem is and how a 'Trace and Fill' feature would be an asset.

Exploded views.afdesign

[MEB]

Hi jackamus,

What you're describing is a feature similar to Live Paint in illustrator. It basically find the boundaries of the shapes/forms to be filled, no matter if they are limited by lines of other shapes and fill them with the chosen colour. This was already requested here, but as I said there i think it will take us some time to get there. This depends (i believe) on getting the code that calculates boolean operations right and also relies on the ability to perform boolean operations between shapes and lines, which we currently don't do yet.

MattP can give you more details on this, but in any case i don't believe it will be available in the short term.

[jackamus]

Hi MEB,

It's nice to see that someone else has the same idea. I'll just have to practice drawing round a component with a pen tool until this feature is available.