I was showing all the new features of Illustrator CS4 to a group of designers this week, and someone in the class asked if there were a way to retract one of the bezier handles associated with an anchor point without disturbing or changing the angle of the other handle on the point.
I don't know of any way to easily do this in Illustrator. But while looking for something else this evening, I stumbled across BetterHandles from NineBlock Software. This nifty Illustrator Plug-in for Macintosh or Windows versions of Illustrator does exactly what the client was asking for, and much more.
Download the demo and try it out...it's really slick!
Turn on Smart Guides, hit Shift C and drag the handle to the point which will be magnetic.
ReplyDeleteSimple.
@Anonymous: This is a clever solution that I hadn't thought of. THANKS! So the BetterHandles plug-in isn't necessary for this task, but it has some other useful features that are worth checking out.
ReplyDeleteI love BetterHandles. For anyone who liked Freehand, it makes the transition to Illustrator that much easier.
ReplyDeleteI also find BettreHandles smart delete a great tool. I am only a beginner but I can see the value of it
ReplyDeleteIf I've understood the problem correctly then you can use the convert anchor tool to move one handle without disturbing the other one. And if you drag the handle over the anchor point then that deletes that handle altogether.
ReplyDeleteHi I have illustrator cs6 and one of my biggest problems when warping text to a shape is to get one handle set only to have it undone when I try to set the other handle. Will this software work with CS 6?
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