A Contour Drawing Dilemma

[DarkAngel]

Adobe Illustrator CS3 Tip - A Contour Drawing Dilemma

A friend of mine loves creating contour drawings of various objects around his studio using the Pencil tool in Illustrator. Last evening I got a call from him to help with a technical question. He had a contour drawing of his cat created with one very long Pencil path. He was very happy with the results until he tried to print it and got a Limit-Check Error. “What in the heck is this error about?" he asked, “And how do I fix it?"

I answered,

“In printing an Illustrator file, there is a limit to the number of segments that any one path can contain. In rare instances, a very long or complex path has too many segments to print.

The solution to this problem is actually quite simple. Before you start however, save your illustration with another name, just to play it safe.

Select your long contour path and switch to the Scissors (C) tool and click somewhere in the middle of the path to cut it into two fairly equal shorter paths.

With a closed path, you will need to cut twice with the Scissors to divide the path into two. Now, with two shorter paths instead of one very long path, your cat contour drawing should print with no problem." Within seconds, his laser printer purred like a kitten as it printed out the cat drawing.

[thelufias]

More tips for the manual.....We'll have the whole thing pretty soon LOL.....Love it....Thanks DA