Illustrator bar graph ticks forget formatting when Value Axis set to top side or both sides

No answer yet, but I've found that there's more to this bug. If you set Value Axis: On Both Sides, then put in seperate settings for Bottom Axis and Top Axis, the settings for Top Axis get ignored and the settings for Bottom Axis behave like Top Axis (i.e. affected by this bug).

e.g. if you set 'Bottom Axis' to 'None' and Top Axis to 'Full Width', there are no lines. If you set 'Bottom Axis' to 'Short' and Top Axis to 'Full Width', there are short lines, but they are at the top, not the bottom as set, and there are no full height lines.

Still no answer, but I've had the opportunity to try this out on CS4 on Windows, and it seems to have the same problem.

I've also tested stacked bar charts, and they have the same problem as clustered bar charts.

Column charts, however, don't seem to have any equivalent problem. They seem to remember their formatting regardless of whether it is set to left, right or both.

It seems like it's a bug specifically with Bar graphs (of both types).

Bump.

Is there any way to get someone from Adobe to look at this? It looks like a bug.

Bump.

I've tried to report this bug as a bug using the offical bug reporting form, twice now, but the bug reporting tool has a bug - both times, it failed with this message and forgot everything I entered:

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Complete waste of time. Can Adobe do anything that works?

Not only does it crash, but each time it crashes like this, it then fails to load the form from then on. Now, just going to the page https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform results in this error.

Even if I believed Adobe were capable of making a simple form submission system work, I couldn't try sending the form again, because the form won't even load after it has failed to submit (browser is Chrome for Mac).

This isn't an answer - but it's the closest I've found yet. Frankly, it's utterly stupid, but it's a small step forward.

You can make Illustrator remember the stroke settings of the top axis line and ticks, but only if they are to be exactly the same as each other, and only by following this ridiculous method:

1. Select the whole graph object (direct selection tool). Give the whole thing the stroke settings that you want to stick to the top axis and axis tick marks. At first, it'll look awful.
2. One-by-one, using the group selection tool, go through every other group in the chart and remove the stroke or return it to how it should be. This will include: the labels in the top axis and category axis, the category axis line, any category axis tick marks, every data series, and if you've got an axis on both sides, the bottom axis.

Still a bug, but this flawed, stupid workaround is better than nothing (so long as it's okay to have the ticks and axis line styled exactly the same).

The bug is still applying with the above method. It's still reverting to the default each time. But at least it's not as bad a default. There are however two problems you should be warned about:

• Any time you apply a graph design to a column, this gets forgotten and you need to do it all again. So, if you are using column designs, apply them first, then do this workaround.
• Using this method introduces a new irritation: any time you add a new data series, it will have the same stroke settings as the top axis (because that's now the default).

I'm sadly all too aware of Adobe's shortcomings here...

It turns out there's yet another bug even with the awful workaround above. The behaviour of charts changes when you save the file and reload it.

After reloading, the style of the text labels of the top axis either revert to match the bottom axis if there is one, or if there isn't, they revert to default (Myriad Pro and whatever stroke you applied above).

So, if you want to reload your file and you want to keep your text formatting, you have to:

• Use 'Value Axis: On both sides' even if that isn't what you want.
• Keep the style of the bottom axis how you want your top axis to look (even though that isn't what you want)
• Hide your bottom axis some other way. For example, you could plonk a white rectangle over it, or select the whole group with Group Selection tool and move it down off the bottom of the artboard.

..and there's yet another bug with this.

All the above only works if you give the strokes a fixed colour. If you set the strokes for the upper axis lines to blank using the above method, it forgets that you did so and reverts them back to whatever their most recent non-blank colour was.

The only thing it's capable of applying to the top axis lines on redraw seems to be whatever the default stroke is for the graph as a whole, and it can only remember to apply that if it's not blank.

Hopeless.

If you need the top axis lines to be transparent, here's the closest I can find to a solution:

• Set the stroke for everything like above, set it to 0.1pt and white
• Set the transparency blend mode for the whole chart to 'darken'. These white outlines now do nothing but trim the very edges off type and solid shapes.
• Use Group Selection to take the stroke off any group containing type.