Early October 2021 updates

With major work being carried out in the background to bring you two ground-breaking plugins—at this stage, we can only confirm one being Reform v2—these latest updates bring minor, but welcome enhancements. You can read a detailed list on our Technical Updates page.

What they all have in common is that they are customer-led, many of which originating from our community forum hosted on Slack. Not joined? Simply click here...

We take customer suggestions very seriously. Many of the apparently smaller changes are the ones which make the greatest difference in enhancing an Illustrator user's workflow! It's all available to every subscriber as the key benefit of the Astute Graphics subscription service.

Keeping on the straight and narrow

With Adobe's highly requested rotating artboard update found in Illustrator 2021 (v25.3), users started to find that when the artboard is rotated, it's sometimes useful to be able to easily draw horizontal and vertical to the screen. Our DirectPrefs plugin, which remains free to all who sign-up for a free, 7-day trial, now adds a deceptively simple option:

Enabling this highlighted option will allow you to constrain the angle (typically with the use of the Shift key in most native and Astute Graphics tools) taking your artboard rotation angle automatically into account.

Simply update your plugins using the Astute Manager to access this.

Texting more effectively

VectorFirstAid is an amazing Swiss army knife for Adobe Illustrator users and cherished by all Astute Graphics customers. These updates bring incremental improvements for text handling:

• Shift-clicking on “Break Text into Lines” now breaks it into paragraphs.

• New “Type > Remove Line Breaks” menu command.

• “Remove Paragraph Breaks” now works on selected text only.

• “Remove Paragraph Breaks” is now actionable.

Blink and it's gone

The Dynamic Measure tool in VectorScribe has now been available for over 10 years and remains the best way to quickly and easily measure aspects of artwork.

These updates bring a neat little trick; when creating a dynamic measure whilst holding down the Alt/Opt key will ensure the measurement disappears automatically after a few seconds. It's a little trick, yet amazingly useful if you just want to quickly check a size without clearing the result afterwards!

As with all keypress modifiers, the AstuteBuddy panel is there to prompt and remind you of the amazing array of options across all plugins.