It's rarely 'simple'. Frankly, after 5 years, I am almost totally passive aggressive with AI.

I came over from Corel which had totally drop simple tools for doing what I need to do... ie. drawing nicely aligned geometric type objects. For example, it took 10 seconds to do a box or triangles or anything with -symmetrical- geometry. You'd hold down the shift key and auto-magically get 30, 45, 90 perfect arrows and perspective correct rectangles, conic sections, etc. It was just 'smarter' about stuff like that. AI feels like you -really- gotta get inside it and -then- you can do anything. But for what -I- do... where I just want to fire it up for 10 minutes do something quick and pedestrian and then get back to my -real- job? Frustrating.

So what I always hope against hope for are shortcuts to doing those sort of 'dummy' tasks... and if Live Trace worked as I hope, it would be a life saver for me.

I find myself often using PS, instead of AI, even when AI is the better tool, because, frankly, I'm just so much more comfy with it.

Anyone else?

This is a sorta typical example:

Maybe it's a little harder than average but to -me-, AI should have some sort of 'edge detection' to convert this to about two dozen straight 'lines'.

But what it -does- is either turn it into a mass of paisley swirls -or- if I use the 'photo' setting, the trace looks mostly like the original, BUT it's created almost 1 path for every frickin' pixel.

What I end up doing---if I really need it---is to trace over it with the mouse, but I confess I'm a LOUSY 'pen drawer' so it often goes awry. Most often? I make a print-out, trace it on paper with a sharpie, then re-scan it into AI. And THEN it will 'Live Trace' OK... seems like a total Rube Goldberg but AI seems to -need- that sharpie.

So... in lieu of going to pen boot camp, I was -hoping- that this was just operator error.

Anyone?

---JC

How does my eyeball do it? How does some of the image enhancement plugs in PS do it?