Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to this video tutorial today We’re going to look at finding open pars in Illustrator. Why it’s an issue and how you can resolve it before we start the video, a couple of things. Firstly, if you do enjoy the video, give it a thumbs up. Click the subscribe button hit the notification bell. In addition, if you’d like to find more of my training, you can find it at Udemy and at Skillshare in the description below our coupon links for each of those sites, My deals are at least as good as the ones that you’ll find on either of those sites and often minor even better. I have five courses on Udemy and hundreds of classes at Skillshare. So let’s swing back to illustrator here on the screen. I have some of the elements that are going to go together to make a Toronto pattern now. There are some issues with stock websites that will not allow you to upload vector files that have open paths in them, so an open path is something like you would create with the pen tool where you’re just clicking across, and that is an open path. It’s not finished off, and so you’re not allowed to have those four stock images, and if you have open pass, your vector stock is going to be rejected. In addition, open paths are just not a particularly good idea anyway. So how do you work out? You’ve even got open paths. Well, you’re going to choose window and then document info, and if you go over here to objects, then you’ll see whether you’ve got any open paths, but, of course, before you do that, you have to select whatever it is that you want to test, so I have now all the objects on my artboard selected and here you’ll see that there are 3811 paths of which nine of them are open and so they are a concern to me. The problem is if I’ve got 3811 Pass finding the nine open pass is going to be a bit of an issue so while we know that we actually have a problem, the question becomes. How do we solve it well? The solution is twofold. Firstly, we have to find those paths and then we have to either. Close them or delete them. Deleting them is very easy. Closing them is a little bit more difficult, but the problem of finding the path is this. There is no feature in illi’s that finds open paths. So what we’re going to do is head to the Web. Now this website, you’ll see the link to it on the screen. This is a site for a number of plugins, most of which happen to be a for fee, but there is a free one, and it happens to be the one We want when you get here. Press ctrl or command. F and just type in select because what you’re looking for, is this select menu and that will take you automatically to it now. This is a free plugin, and it adds things to the select menu, one of the things that it adds to the. Select menu is open path so we can then select open paths off the Select menu. So you’re going to come to here and just click to download which one you want so in my case? I’m using illustrator CC 2019 On a Windows machine, so Ill. Select that you’ll see that there are options for 32-bit. Although most people’s computers are going to be 64-bit these days. If you’re running these applications and you’re running them on a fairly new computer, you can pretty much assume you’re working on a 64-bit machine for the Mac. There is only one choice of options, so you’re going to download that file, so let’s swing across to see what it looks like. It’s going to come down as a zip file on a Mac. You’ll just double, click it, and that will just open it and extract it on a PC. You’ll need to double Click it to open it. And then you want to extract all files now. I’ve already done that. What you end up with is a readme and an AIP file. The AIP file is the Plugin. Now this is a plug-in, not a script, so it’s critical that you put it in the right place. You’re gonna right-click and just choose copy, so you’ve got it on the clipboard on a Windows machine. You’re going to your computer, so you need to get to your C. Drive, and then you need to get to Program Files. Go to Adobe and then locate your version of illustrator In my case. It’s CC 2019 Here it is here. I’m gonna double click on it. You’ll see that there’s a plugin’s folder and we will put it here in the plugin’s folder. I’ve already done that because you do need to restart your computer to install those plugins now while you here if you want to be able to close paths. I’ll also get you a link for the closed paths zip file. So this is it here. I’ve already extracted the contents. There’s a close all pass script, and there’s a close selected path script again. You’re going to grab both of these? I’m going to copy them and again. These need to go in a certain location, so we’re going to computer again. C Drive Program Files, Adobe. Locate your version of illustrator mine. CC 2019 Go to presets go to your language, which, in my case is English US, but you’ll have a language appropriate to what language you’re using, and then you’ll go to scripts and you’re going to put it in here, and so I’ve already installed. Closed all paths and closed selected paths. And then you’ll restart illustrator now on the Mac. This is the location that you’re going to put the files in. It’s a little easier on the Mac because you’re going to find your illustrator folders in the applications area. So once you’ve installed those in the correct location and restarted illustrator, lets. Go and see how we’re going to use these features. When you restart illustrator, you’ll see a little message on the screen, saying that the Plug-in has been successfully installed, so we’ll go to select and we’ll go to object and you’ll find that there are now a whole heap of additional things on the select object menu, including open paths, so we’ll click here on open paths, and illustrator has now selected the open paths. I’m going to press f7 to get my layer’s palette, and you’ll see that these open paths are spread throughout this document. They’re in all sorts of places, so it would be very difficult to find them otherwise, but now that they’re selected, we can do something with them well. The obvious thing is that since they’re so few of them, and they’re not really contributing much here, I could just press the Delete key, and that would delete them, so let’s do that. I’m just going to press the Delete key and they will be deleted, but let’s undo that in case. What you want to do is to close the path, so they’re now back in the document. Let’s see what we do. We would choose file and then scripts and because we’ve got the path selected that we want to close. We will just choose clothes, selected paths and those paths will now be closed so that they are no longer open paths, which means that when we go to select and then object and open path, we’re not going to get any selection because there are no open paths. We can also go back to the document info and just confirm this with window and then document information here we have now. 3811 closed path. None of them are open so. I hope that this has helped you understand how you can determine whether you have any open paths and then solve it by either selecting and deleting them or selecting and closing them and just a heads up the reason why we’re doing this in part is that high-end websites that are selling stock will not let you have open paths in your document so? I hope that this has helped you understand a little bit more about open paths and how to deal with them in Illustrator. If you enjoy the video, please give it A thumbs up, hit the subscribe button. Click the notification bell until next time. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me here on my Youtube channel.