Easily amused

For four years now, I’ve been drawing all my charts, schematics, and diagrams in Adobe Illustrator. It ain’t cheap, but it’s worth it: Illustrator produces publication-quality vector graphics (no jaggies from low-res bitmap graphics), and gives me complete control over every aspect of the final illustrations (yes, I might be a bit of a control freak, at least when it comes to my illustrations). And, once you learn your way around, it’s a lot of fun. You never know what cool little feature you might find, hiding out in a corner you’ve never checked into before.

Case in point:

You can move the current selection by dragging it with the cursor—even Illustrator novices figure that out pretty quick. Or you can move it by pressing an arrow key on the keyboard. That’s especially handy when you have Snap to Grid turn on—for example, when drawing charts: Need to nudge a symbol over by one chart square? Just press an arrow key, and it’ll snap into place.

And you can copy the current selection by holding down the Option key as you drag (on a Mac, please—don’t ask me about the PC equivalent). But it only last week that I realized you could copy the current selection by holding down the Option key as you pressed an arrow key.

Oh, why had that cool little feature been hiding from me for so long? It’s exceptionally handy when drawing charts. Picture this: you want to draw a row of purl symbols. Plop one into the row’s leftmost chart square. Select the symbol. Now hold down the Option key and repeatedly press the right arrow key. Presto! A row of purl symbols. Or a column, or a bunch of rows or columns, or whatever, all in less time than it takes to read this paragraph.

sigh

Yes, I’m easily amused. And I wonder what other Illustrator tricks still await discovery.

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