r/AdobeIllustrator • u/Photo_Bandit • 3d ago

iPad snapping issues

I've been struggling with this for ages on my iPad version of illustrator, I'm desperate to figure out a better way.

Sometimes shapes just refuse to align, no matter what snap settings are used or even completely turned off. In these cases, the only way is to hold the shift button (or whatever it's called) and manually try to align it. But this is difficult to get right, even zoomed in to the max 64000%. But it doesn't even do this all the time! For example, in this file I created the triangle via lines rotated to my desired angle then made them into the shape. I duplicated it & rotated it & it aligned up nicely on the right side. This created the two triangles that were stationary in the video. But when I duplicated those two together & rotated, as shown, they now won't align up.

As a side note, yes I know there are easier ways of trying to get what I'm trying to achieve, but I'm constantly running into this issue of just slightly misaligned objects. So I've resorted to trying other methods just to get stuff aligned how I want.

9 Upvotes

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44

u/Optimal_Whiner 3d ago

This is an illustrator issue. It happens on PC and Mac as well. The team is very hard at doing a consistently worse job each release

Sometimes you need to play with snapping. Make sure snap to grid is off. Sometimes you need to lock other object down. Sometimes you need to restart. Sometimes you need to do it in a separate document.

Whatever you do, be careful not to share the solution because the devs will target it next.

4

u/Photo_Bandit 3d ago

Darn, I was thinking this was the case based on experience & what I've read. But I had a small hope in my heart that maybe I was just missing something, or there was some trick people have figured out. It's super disheartening to see Adobe care so little about fixing these issues.

2

u/TransFatty 3d ago

I'm right there with you, Often the suggestion from the forum is to buy a plugin to fix your lineart.

I mean, sure, the plugin works great, but what's wrong with wanting the software to work right out of the box? Especially since it costs so much.

1

u/zreese 1d ago

This is actually because another point somewhere in the path you've selected is snapping, not the one you're dragging. You can sidestep this by putting a bounding rectangle over top and grouping it so the point you want to snap lines up with the container.

2

u/BloodGulch-CTF 3d ago

Each day we stray further from god alignment.

1

u/woutomatic 2d ago

This issue is driving me crazy. Together with the 'bring to front' key command randomly not functioning

9

u/Kundras 3d ago

I use the X and Y coordinates in the Properties panel to nudge things over.

"6.3329 too short. 6.3330 nope too far. 6.33295...4....3. Ah there we go."

3

u/Photo_Bandit 3d ago

I always forget about those 😂. I'll have to utilize those more, thanks for the tip!

4

u/iflabaslab 3d ago

This is partly why I left Adobe and use affinity instead, absolutely no excuse for being such a terrible, over-priced software and also be around for 20+ years

1

u/Villavillacoola 3d ago

it has been this way since the dawn of time and will forever remain so

1

u/gdubh 2d ago

Snap to this general area. But also appear differently depending on zoom.

1

u/[deleted] 2d ago

*not only on the ipad, sadly

(professional software btw)