Aligning and Distributing Objects


When working with a range of objects, you will often want to align them evenly or distribute them across a specified distance. Rather than being forced to figure out the math on your own and then manually move each object, you can apply the variety of functions that Illustrator's Align palette contains to a range of objects in order to both align and distribute objects precisely. The Align palette can be opened by choosing Window > Align. To align a range of objects, select them and click one of the Align icons in the Align palette. Admittedly, these small icons can be hard to decipher, but if you let your mouse pointer hover over them for a second, a tool tip pops up identifying the name of the function (Figure 4.58).

Figure 4.58. The icons in the Align palette can be a bit difficult to decipher, so it's a good idea to watch for the tool tips that pop up.


The align functions consider a group of objects to be a single object, so performing an align function on a group won't do anything (you're basically aligning a single object to itself). However, you can select multiple groups and align them as if each group were a single object.

Unfortunately, the align functions only work on complete paths. You cannot apply align functions to the individual points of a path. For aligning specific anchor points, you are pretty much limited to using the Average command, covered earlier in this chapter.

Aligning Objects to a Specific Object

You'll notice that when you align several objects, all of the objects move. However, there are times when you have the position of one object set perfectly, and you want to be able to align all of your selected objects to that specific object. You can do this by defining what Illustrator calls a key object.

To define a key object, select all of the objects that you want to align, and then, using the Selection tool, click once on the object to which you want all other the objects to align.

Additionally, you can choose to align objects to the document artboard. This can be helpful if you want to easily center objects on a page. From the Align palette menu, choose Align to Artboard (Figure 4.59). This setting is a toggle and it stays on until you turn it off.

Figure 4.59. Choosing the Align to Artboard setting from the Align palette menu makes it easy to align objects to the artboard.



You can use the distribute functions that appear in the bottom half of the Align palette to space multiple objects evenly. Illustrator takes the objects at the two extremes of your selection and uses those as the boundaries of the distribution. All objects that appear between those two shapes are distributed evenly between them, based on the specific distribute function that you choose (Figure 4.60).

Figure 4.60. When you're distributing objects, the objects at the opposite extremes define the boundary and all objects are distributed evenly between them.


If you choose Show Options from the Align palette menu, you can also perform distribute commands based on spacing. You can specify a numeric value and then distribute the selected objects vertically or horizontally.




Real World Adobe Illustrator CS2
Real World Adobe Illustrator CS2
ISBN: 0321337026
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 147
Authors: Mordy Golding

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