Im using carbide create V7 free edition, is there a way for me to fix this file so that the state in the background doesnt overlap or run through the letters? Ive attached the file I cut and made intersections like it should look. it would be very nice if there was a way to just close the open vector to the intersecting points that it recognizes. any help is greatly appreciated!!!
Now you just need to do the same with the rest of the shapes.
But you can do it easily using booleans.
Just select the closed shape of the state first, and one of the objects that overlaps it second,
Then do a boolean subtract. Check “Keep Original Vectors”
Now delete the original state vector, and keep the jumper.
and is typical of the sort of thing folks churn out using Illustrator (because of course trapping and any subsequent usage aren’t the problem of the person drawing in AI).
What is wanted is a purely outline representation as noted above, ideally a b/w version which is outlines only, so that there is no overlapping geometry (in addition to removing all the intersections).
Problems of Figure-ground Reversal as previously discussed:
argue for changing the white outline around the smaller text into part of the overall outline — this will be much easier to cut and assign toolpaths to.
Here is the file in its present state for the reader who wishes to experiment with other options:
It was bought almost ten years to the day that Adobe was told that they had to wait a decade before buying any competitors, then shipped off to offshore support in India, then never updated because it would hurt Adobe for Illustrator not to be their flagship product.
Companies should not be allowed to compete with their wallets by buying out and shutting down the competition.
My understanding is that it’s available under long-term support — you have to buy a site volume license (qty 1) from a vendor which specializes in that, plus the license/auditing software, plus a copy of the physical media.
I have a copy 'cause I got one for being a beta-tester for Freehand/MX.
There are two efforts at a successor:
Serif’s Affinity Designer
which is mostly okay (but drives me nuts for the couple of keyboard shortcuts/modifiers it doesn’t support — I used to user Freehand 40+ hours a week, they’re all ingrained in my nervous system/drawing processes)
GraviT — these folks actually stumped for donations under the name Quasado and I gave them more than I could really afford at the time, but I was quite hopeful for a while
Ah ok, that seemed like a pretty simple tool. Still learning how to use Adobe suite and the million different tools they have and it’s been a challenge.
Since Adobe Illustrator was the first program, it didn’t have the advantage of learning from its mistakes as other programs did and many of these mistakes are instantiated in the UI of the program and its file formats making it far more complex than it needs to be.
The nice thing is, once one learns some other similar program, the same concepts apply (just you’ll be annoyed at the Byzantine complexities of AI when you have to use it).
