Illustrator does not provide connector lines. Nor does it provide pre-drawn process diagram symbols. You'd have to draw the symbols from scratch, and even if you did, you'd still not have the efficiency of being able to arrange the linked symbols and have them stay connected as you move them, because of the lack of connector lines.

Especially if you are not already at least working familiar with drawing in Illustrator, you'd frankly be better off in another program; one that does provide connector lines and process diagram symbols.

Corel Draw provides the tools you need in a full-blown drawing environment similar to Illustrator. The draw module of OpenOffice has diagramming tools and connectors, and is open source (free). Not as full-featured as a full-blown drawing program, but I find it less tedious to work with for process diagrams than Visio; and you really don't want to go nuts with stylistic elaboration of a workflow diagram anyway.

JET

I suggest a tool dedicated to the purpose, such as Dia, which is specially made for creating complicated flowcharts, diagrams, etc.

You could do it in Illustrator, but you'll be doing it all manually.

Process Improvement Teams

Steve,

It's just a workflow diagram; in this case, one specifically for software logic or schema. Quite commonly provided for in drawing programs other than Illustrator (just like basic dimension tools, callouts, live shape primitives, etc., etc.). Microsoft Publisher, Visio, even Word; CorelDraw, OpenOffice. Not Illustrator.

There are standardized box shapes for different disciplines. In software schema, a rectangle is a process step, a diamond is a decision, etc. The boxes typically auto-expand to fit their text.

So yeah, you can make such diagrams in Illustrator, but it's an entirely manual process; ridiculously tedious and time-wasteful because of Illustrator's sub-standard feature set.

Yeah, you could reinvent the wheel by pre-drawing the shapes and storing them as Symbols. But that doesn't give you auto-fitting text behavior. Illustrator could at least accommodate this and more by simply enabling its utterly lame and unintuitive (i.e.; completely screwball) Convert To Shape feature to position and scale any Symbol, instead of being limited to dumb ellipses and rectangles. But no, we'll each pay another $6000-worth of "upgrade" fees before ever seeing such an obvious improvement in year 2032. Just one of many examples of feature non-integration in Illustrator.

Yeah, you could turn on grid snap, manually draw your workflow lines, and move them around segment by segment. But when working on workflow diagrams, you're concentrating on working-out the subject matter. Instead of continually manually adjusting a bunch of dumb disconnected lines, you freely move things around without breaking connections you've already established, and the live connection lines automatically avoid collisions, draw crossovers, etc. But no, a proper connector lines feature is too "ordinary" or "technical" for "professional" and "artsy" Illustrator. Really? Draw's Connector Lines are not just for flowcharts. Unlike most implementations, they can be attached at the Node level. So they can be used to draw extrusions based on outlined text or any other shapes. The depth of the extrusions can then be adjusted by simply dragging the connected shapes. (But wait; Draw also has a proper, straightforward 2D Extrusion Tool, too.)

So this is just one of those subjects that raises the question: Why kick against the thorns by wasting time with Illustrator for this? Use a more full-featured drawing program with less unintuitive non-standard nonsense, less gratuitous ballyhoo over ordinary functionality, and more task-driven practicality.

JET

It would be a good feature for Illustrator as a lot of users seem to come tothe Forum asking instructions for this purpose as well as the measure tools you mention for developing plans etc.

I never made a feature reques for such a feature before but since it comes up so much I will the only question is if there are other applications that already do this why would one need Illustraotr for this would it be worthwhile for Adobe to include such features when users have other concerns?

I wonder how one wold make a good case for these features? Especially since there are prograams designed for this?