Other Vector Drawing Tools

There are two types of people who use Illustrator: those who know how to use the Pen tool and those who don't. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools in the CS2 applications that make it possible to work without ever picking up the pen.

Shape Tools

Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop each have tools for creating rectangles, circles, and polygons. However, they don't have all the same tools (see Table 5-2).

Table 5-2. Creative Suite Vector Tools

Tool Name	Illustrator	InDesign	Photoshop
Pen	Yes	Yes	Yes
Add Anchor Point	Yes	Yes	Yes
Delete Anchor Point	Yes	Yes	Yes
Convert Direction Point	Yes	Yes	Yes
Pencil	Yes	Yes	No
Smooth	Yes	Yes	No
Eraser (for vector paths)	Yes	Yes	No
Line	Yes	Yes	Yes (Lines are not open paths, but thin rectangles)
Arc	Yes	No	No
Spiral	Yes	No	No
Rectangular Grid	Yes	No	No
Polar Grid	Yes	No	No
Rectangle	Yes	Yes	Yes
Rounded Rectangle	Yes	No (Create rounded rectangles using the Corner Effects or Convert Shape commands)	Yes
Ellipse	Yes	Yes	Yes
Polygon	Yes	Yes	Yes
Star	Yes	No	No (Create stars by modifying the Polygon settings)
Flare	Yes	No	No (The Photoshop Flare is a Filter effect, not a vector shape)
Freeform Pen	No	No	Yes
Custom Shape	No	No	Yes

Illustrator comes out ahead, with the largest number of tools. In addition to those for creating rectangles, ellipses, lines, polygons, and stars, Illustrator has an exotic Flare tool and tools for creating arcs, spirals, and rectangular and polar grids.

Tip: Take control of your shape

To set the options for the shape tools in Illustrator and InDesign (number of sides, dimensions, and so on), select the tool and click the page.

InDesign has slightly fewer tools, but several different frame tools. The Rectangle, Ellipse, and Polygon tools create unassigned paths that can have fill and stroke default settings. The Rectangle Frame, Ellipse Frame, and Polygon Frame tools create graphics frames that indicate that an image should be inserted into the frame.

InDesign doesn't have any of Illustrator's "way out" vector tools no Flare, no Grid tools, no Arc tool, and no Spiral. But who needs 'em? You can easily move vector paths from one application to another. That's one of the big advantages to working with the CS2 applications. Illustrator becomes the back-door drawing program for InDesign and Photoshop. You can use Illustrator to create a spiral, and then copy and paste it into InDesign or Photoshop. (See the section "Moving Paths Between Applications" later in this chapter for more information on moving vectors between the applications.)

Like the Pen tool, the shape tools in each of the applications have common keyboard controls for creating objects. For instance, you can hold down the Shift key to constrain a rectangle or ellipse into a square or circle. Use the modifiers in Table 5-3 to change how the shape tools work in Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop.

Table 5-3. How to Modify Shape Tools While Drawing

To do this	Use these keys	Notes
Constrain to proportional measurements.	Hold down Shift while dragging.	Also constrains the Line tool to 45° increments.
Constrain lines to 90° and 45° angles.	Hold down Shift while dragging.
Draw from the center outward.	Hold down Option/Alt while dragging.	Does not apply to drawing polygons, stars, and flares, which always are drawn from the center outward.
Create a shape numerically from its center.	Hold down Option/Alt and click.	Illustrator and InDesign only.
Reposition an object as you draw it.	Hold down the Spacebar and then move the cursor.
Change the inset shape for stars and polygons.	Hold down Command/Ctrl in Illustrator. Press the Left or Right Arrow key in InDesign.	No similar feature in Photoshop.
Change the number of points or sides of stars and polygons.	Press the Up or Down Arrow keys.	InDesign requires dragging the cursor in or out to change the number of sides. No similar feature in Photoshop.

Pencils and Free-Form Tools

If you are truly pen-impaired, you can still draw curves and other free-form shapes. Both Illustrator and InDesign have a Pencil tool that lets you simply drag to create lines and curves. Photoshop's Pencil tool is not a vector-drawing tool. It only works in a pixel-drawing mode.

Using the Pencil Tool in InDesign and Illustrator

Choose the Pencil tool in the Tools palette. Drag to create a path. When you release the mouse button, the program creates the proper anchor points to create the shape you have defined. We find that at the default settings, the Pencil tool creates paths that are too rough: Too many anchor points correspond to every little wiggle of the mouse. To smooth out the Pencil paths, use the Pencil Tool preferences.

Double-click the Pencil tool in the Tools palette to open the Pencil Tool preferences (see Figure 5-10). Change the two Tolerances controls, Fidelity and Smoothness, to make the Pencil tool less sensitive to small jiggles and create smoother paths.

Figure 5-10. Pencil Tool preferences for Illustrator (left) with an option to fill new pencil strokes, and InDesign (right).

The Fidelity slider controls how much the Pencil tool-drawn path follows your mouse movements. Low Fidelity settings create more anchor points causing all sorts of little bumps and curves along the path. As you increase the Fidelity value, the path ignores small mouse movements. The Smoothness slider changes the smoothness of the path curves. Lower smoothness values usually result in more anchor points and preserve more of a line's irregularities; higher values result in fewer anchor points and a smoother path. The default of 0% applies no smoothness to the path.

Using the Freeform Pen Tool in Photoshop

Why doesn't Photoshop have a Pencil tool? The answer is that Photoshop already had a bitmapped Pencil tool. So rather than confuse people, Adobe created a Freeform Pen tool for Photoshop. The Freeform Pen tool has two modes. The regular mode lets you draw irregular paths by dragging, similar to using the Pencil tool in Illustrator or InDesign.

However, most people use the vectors in Photoshop to outline images, such as for clipping paths that create silhouettes of images. The second mode of the Freeform Pen tool, the Magnetic Pen tool, automatically snaps paths to the defined edges of the image. The Freeform Pen tool options let you control how the path is created.

Figure 5-11. Photoshop Magnetic Pen tool outlining an image, with path snapping around its outline.

Using the Smooth Tool in InDesign and Illustrator

So what if you've created a path or inherited some art that is quite jagged and needs to be smoothed out? Illustrator has a command to Smooth Path. But what if you want to smooth just a section of a path? Or you want to smooth a path in InDesign, which has no Smooth Path command? That's when you choose the Smooth tool. Drag the Smooth tool along a jagged path and smooth out all the nooks and crannies.

Using the Eraser Tool in InDesign and Illustrator

In the early days of Illustrator, to delete part of a path, you selected the anchor points along that section and pressed the Delete key. That still works, but these days you young'uns now have a vector Eraser tool. Just drag the Eraser tool along part of a path to delete that section. The advantage to working with the Eraser tool is you can erase part of a path even if that part has no anchor points. The Eraser tool adds the necessary points to delete just that portion of the path.

Applying Custom Shapes in Photoshop

Think of the Custom Shape tool as a library of shapes that you can quickly add to an image. Simply choose the Custom Shape tool from the Options bar, and then select the shape you want in the Shape palette (see Figure 5-12). Drag to create the shape. The shapes can be distorted as you drag or hold down the Shift key to constrain them to their original proportions.

Figure 5-12. Photoshop CS2 Shape palette with sample of included shapes.

The shapes in the palette are just a sample of the ones that ship with Photoshop. Click the palette menu to add more shapes, such as talk bubbles, music, banners, animals, arrows, and ornamental shapes.