Reversing path direction
Doug Katz
Thanks.
Joe Duhamel
Doug Katz
That I can't do so in AI will simply force me to be more vigilant about my initial path directions and the impact my abuse has... not exactly a cause for dismay.
Chris Pugh
thanks for any help with this problem
Richard Schletty
Neither elegant or intuitive.
Doug Katz
I learned an elegant shortcut for this on this forum: Make your circle, set your upper text, choose the selection tool, Option+drag your type from the top of the circle to the bottom. You're actually cloning both text and circle. Then edit the bottom text.
Richard Schletty
Gary Newman
And for type along the bottom of a circle, instead of making the circle larger, just keep it the same size and use a negative Baseline Shift to move the type down relative to the line to which it’s attached.
Richard Schletty
The baseline shift for bottom type on a circle is a great tip. I forgot about that.
Richard Schletty
Teri Pettit
Doug,
If you are mainly concerned with the order for text-on-a-path, isn't your text upside down from how you want it as well as flowing in the wrong direction? That's what I would expect to happen if the path direction somehow got reversed. (Draw two paths with the pen tool, one by working from left to right like is most common in our culture, and one by starting at the right and drawing to the left. Put text on both paths. The first will put the text right-side-up and flow from left to right, the second will put the text upside-down and flow from right to left.)
If that's the case, then just flip your text by grabbing hold of the anchor bar and dragging it to the opposite side of the path. Which is the same thing that would happen if you reversed the path direction.
If that puts the text on the wrong side of the path, then you will have to use Gary's suggestion of setting a baseline shift to move it up or down after dragging the anchor to the other side.
Gary,
Actually, you can't click on "either end point" of an open path to reverse it with the pen tool, you have to click on the "start point". (Easily observed by putting an arrowhead effect on an open path and then clicking on the arrowhead end vs the tail end.) Why? Because the pen tool always appends new points to the "end point" of the path. So when you click on the "start point", indicating that you want to append anchor points at what the pen tool thinks of as the wrong end, it reverses the path so that it can work in the direction it is accustomed to working in. If you click on what is already the end point, then no modification is necessary to get the path in the right working order.
But Richard is right that the trick about clicking with the pen tool on the "start point" of the path won't work for text paths.
Why? Because the pen tool "knows" that path direction is significant for paths with text on them. Ordinarily users have already set up the text to flow in the order they want, and they'd be quite upset if it flipped upside down and backwards just because they wanted to extend the path at beginning. So when the path has text on it, or when it is part of a compound path, instead of just reversing the path, the pen tool sets a little flag saying "append points at the start instead of the end". Then each time a point gets added, it reverses the path, appends a point, and reverses it back, before ever displaying the changes. This is of course less efficient than reversing it once and being done with it, so it doesn't do things that way for all paths. For normal paths not inside of compound paths and with no text on them, it thinks the order doesn't matter to the user, so it feels free to leave them in the order that's convenient for itself. Any observable reversal is an unintentional side effect. (This algorithm predates brushes and effects, for which path direction is also often significant. It was never updated for them because we decided that the bug could be considered a feature, providing a mechanism for reversing open paths.)
That still leaves no easy way to reverse path direction on an open path. One way is to cut it, reverse it, then join it back. Another way is to make a scrap object, make it part of a compound path with that scrap, reverse it, release the compound path, and delete the scrap piece.
What we really should do is just enable the Reverse Path Direction attribute for all paths, instead of just components of compound paths. The restriction to compound paths is an anachronism, dating back to AI 88 when path order was only relevant within compound paths. (The exception in the pen tool for compound paths existed in AI 88, and when text-on-a-path was added in AI 3, the exception was extended to them. But the "Reverse Path Direction" attribute is still living in the distant past.)
Doug Katz
Richard Schletty
Now, your suggestion to combine the open path with a scrap object to make a compound path can't be done if the open path has already been made into a text path -- Illustrator says "all objects in a compound path...cannot be brushed or be part of an object". If I use an open path that has not been modified by text and create a compound path with a scrap object, then reverse the path direction of the open path, then cut away the scrap object, I am left with a single path that is still compound but cannot have text applied to it. If I release compound on that open text path, then the path reversal in Attributes goes gray (as expected) and text applied to that open path (which supposedly had its direction reversed) is normal.
So, I think my original suggestion is best: just copy the path with a single Option-click of the Direct Select Tool, clear the path with the Delete key, then paste in front. It makes the open path "normal". Or use Rick Johnson's Nudge palette to Untransform the text path. Both work.
Joe Duhamel said "if you use the reflect tool the path direction should reflect with it." That's OK for symmetrical open paths but not for asymmetrical paths.
Yes, definitely add a button or command for non-compound path reversal to AI 11 (or 14).
Teri Pettit
Re: "When Doug said reversed I took it to mean reversed and ON TOP of an open path (not below the path and appearing as if the type is rotated 180°). I certainly realize that one can grab the text anchor with the Select Tool and flip text from below to above. Rather, I think Doug has some open paths that are actually reversed. I simulated the reversal by doing text on an open path and using the Reflect Tool to flop it right to left."
Could be. Doug did not mention his characters being mirror-imaged, but it is certainly possible that they were and he just didn't think it was relevant.
But since he asked specifically about a workaround for the Reverse Path Direction attribute, I replied accordingly. Dragging the text anchor to the other side is what's functionally equivalent to reversing the anchor points. It is true that dragging the anchor point would not remove a reflection transform matrix, but then neither would Reverse Path Direction, even if it were enabled.
Removing a reflection transform has little to do with reversing the path direction, and is more akin to removing the transform matrix that gets attached to a text object when you Shear it. (In the scenario you describe with the Reflect tool, it is not the "open path" that is "actually reversed." It is the text object that has had a matrix attached to it. A reflection matrix that causes your characters to look mirror-imaged will also get attached if you reflect an area text or point text object, and those aren't affected by path direction at all.)
Re: "If I use an open path that has not been modified by text and create a compound path with a scrap object, then reverse the path direction of the open path, then ... I release compound on that open text path, then the path reversal in Attributes goes gray (as expected) and text applied to that open path (which supposedly had its direction reversed) is normal."
Well, it is not mirror-imaged, if that's what you meant by "normal". But if I draw an open path from left to right, put it in a compound with another path, direct-select the open path and reverse its direction in the Attributes palette, then release the compound and put text on the open path, the text acts as if the path were drawn from right to left instead of from left to right. So it has accomplished a Reverse Path Direction.
Re: "Now, your suggestion to combine the open path with a scrap object to make a compound path can't be done if the open path has already been made into a text path."
True. It wasn't meant as a suggestion for Doug to use, and in fact I did not even mention those steps when talking about open paths at all, let alone open paths with text on them. It was mentioned in an offside remark about reversing closed paths, and that remark was mainly there to show how many hoops you have to jump through to get a closed path to reverse.
Re: "So, I think my original suggestion is best: just copy the path with a single Option-click of the Direct Select Tool, clear the path with the Delete key, then paste in front. It makes the open path "normal". Or use Rick Johnson's Nudge palette to Untransform the text path. Both work."
Both will work to remove a transform matrix, and so are best if that's what Doug needed to accomplish. (They would also work for removing the transform matrix from area text.) This works because the matrix is attached to the text object, not to the path, and you aren't copying the text object.
But neither method would reverse the path direction. The pasted path would still have the same clockwise vs counter-clockwise direction that the original one had.
What steps one would need to take would depend on how literally one takes Doug's question about "Reverse Path Direction." Did he really mean that he wanted to reverse the path direction, or did he mean that he wanted to remove a reflection matrix? It is hard to tell from his original post.
Richard Schletty
Doug Katz
In any case, the text goes the wrong way when a path is drawn East to West (or counterclockwise).
In FreeHand, if I've made that mistake (drawing right to left) and placed text on the wrongly drawn path, I can select the path, choose the Reverse Direction command, and end up with readable text, i.e., the path direction is reversed and the text reflows left to right. When I first saw a similar sounding operation in AI on the Attributes palette, I thought it would function similarly with simple open or closed paths. When it didn't I consulted the manual, then checked my understanding with my original post.
Thurgood
Doug Katz
Thurgood
Richard Schletty
I accept responsibility for blowing this discussion out of proportion by misinterpreting what Doug's month-old problem was (reflection of text across a vertical axis vs. 180° rotation of text across the text baseline). However, we did determine that AI could use an easy way of reversing the direction of a non-compound path (e.g. a button), as well as a way to "see" the values in a transform matrix that has been applied to an object (the way Rick Johnson's Nudge palette and Quark's Measurements palette can).
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