Hello Scott,

Thank you for your answer!

I’m sorry to ask again: as I’m not working on an English-version of Illustrator, I made a few screenshots in order to make sure which prompt is meant. Some feedback would be great, merci!

Thank you Martina!

These pages make things much smoother

Hey Scott,

Your English and your hints are perfect – it’s more a question of interpretation on my side, as I started this thread watching on the german version of Illustrator (prompts & documentation in German) and had no equivalents-list for tool-descriptions in foreign languages. Adobe Help  seems to deploy the user’s manual in one’s programm-version only. Or did I miss something? Martina Gause provided two excellent links. They make it much easier to compare the prompts between English and whatever language.

Reffering: I was much too cautious with my file as a result it was delivered to me with a huge amount of layers and a quite complex structure – but I took the way you described in your next-to-last post:

1) releasing the clipping mask

2) took the counters out of their group, so they could stand together on the same hierachie-level with the layers issued of the clipping mask

3) re-selected and re-compounded all the paths

Now it seems to work, even if I had to rebuild two elements (don’t know why they disappeared).

Would you say this “compound prompt” does the same job as the pathfinder function, if we only look at “putting-pathes-together”?

[scott w] wrote:

 

This may have been a color or stacking issue. Before running the Compound Path commaand it can sometimes be helpful to ensure all object have the same fill color applied to them.

This is precisely what I think makes Illustrator quite complicated at that point. Assuming you’ve built your elements (see screenshot), adding paths to the already existing ones forces you to unbuild. Mostly, the designs are quite complex and you’re not keen on introducing potentially new error sources by let’s say, throwing your elements’s coloration out, then applying it to each one of them new after compounding. I think Illustrator could become more convinient here – or is there another best practice? What do you think?

The magenta triangles disappeared after conpounding and had to be rebuild using a clone of one of the elements next to them. That was much easier than integrating the counters back into the compounded paths, for these layers were on the same hierarchy, with no group interferring.

(magenta = just in order to mark the elements beneath)

Hello Monika, Scott and Wade,

Sorry I forgot to bring up a detail: “The magenta triangles disappeared after conpounding THE COUNTERS WITH THE REMAINING PATH (marked blue here / the clipping mask of the page)”.

The two triangles, formerly marked in magenta (magenta is just a mark-up), disappeared due to an action performed on the outer clipping path of the page (marked blue here). I had to extend and then to crop this path, in order to bring its side lines vertical. It seems “cropping the clipping mask” influenced the objects inside the group in some way. So, you’re right, there is no need for the triangles to be compounded. The necessity of compounding came up in relation with the counters, who also were kicked off from their original stack’s position due to the cropping step. The cropping step affected both, the counters and also the two triangles.

I’m sorry for not having been able to come back sooner to you!