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RE: Re-playing a Transform sequence in illustrator
Subject:RE: Re-playing a Transform sequence in illustrator From:"McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com> To:Tony Chung <tonyc -at- tonychung -dot- ca> Date:Fri, 1 Aug 2014 15:40:01 -0400
Well, my Googly-googly shows that Illustrator does not have a History Panel, as is present in PS and many other graphic apps.
Iâve used Visio, though not for a while, and never tried âShape Sheetsâ. Will give it a peek.
Did you ever see somebody try to get a vehicle out of a tight space, forward, back, forward and a few inches left, back and a few inches right, forward and a few inches left, back, forward, pause........... forward and..... Thatâs how Iâd made the first one fit. Because I couldnât find a history, I could not look back and see what the winning combination was, out of all the various settings Iâd tried in the Transform menu and by simply dragging anchor points.
Anyway, last night, I just brute-forced the other seven label graphics onto the blank-key photo. They all look slightly different at 200-percent, but theyâll be showing at 50-percent or less in the docs, so it doesnât matter. Took a while, though. No doubt, Iâll have to do it again in 2018 if I still work here. :-)
From: Tony Chung [mailto:tonyc -at- tonychung -dot- ca]
Sent: July-31-14 8:04 PM
To: McLauchlan, Kevin
Cc: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Re: Re-playing a Transform sequence in illustrator
Dude. You really need to learn to use Visio and Shape Sheets. A Sr TechCom at one of my previous jobs showed me SS and I've been hunting for opportunities to work with them again. Essentially it's example based programming, but you can also tie it into macros if you really wanted to.
That said, Adobe has a pretty complex Actions feature in PhotoShop that I've seen do everything from batch resize images to export multiple versions of the same graphic for different Apple store icons. I'm sure what you want is possible in Illustrator, but your image would have had to be set up a specific way for it to work.
Oh. And CS4 should have that feature.
-Tony
On Thursday, July 31, 2014, McLauchlan, Kevin <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com<mailto:Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>> wrote:
We have a product, one version of which makes use of several little USB devices. They come in basic black, and we provide peel-and-stick labels to help identify the role and function to which each is assigned.
At some point, years ago, I elected to use a suitable photo of a blank, black "key" (the USB thingie), and to apply the artwork of each label separately, so I'd have an example of each to use as a visual/orientation aid in my docs. This involved skewing and rotating the picture of the label, in Illustrator, so it fit and looked natural on the blank key.
Now, a few years later, the labels have been updated.
I just finished applying various transforms, by trial-and-terror in Illustrator, to make one label fit nicely at the jaunty angle of the photo of the key.
Is there any way to capture the sequence that I just went through, so I can repeat it on seven more labels that I want to apply to the blank key?
It wasn't a straightforward set of two or three pre-determined steps. I poked and prodded and stretched and rotated and squished many times until it finally fit.
Yeah, yeah, next time I'll write down each change I make until I get it right, then just walk through the (amended) list.
But for now, is there a way to have Illustrator open another label artwork and apply the same multi-step kneading to it? And then again for another? And another... ?
I'm not modern. I have a copy of CS4 that I dusted off for the occasion.
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