- [Voiceover] In this movie, we're going to take a look
at subcontainers inside of Illustrator.
Now I showed you sublayers a few movies ago
which, as I've said, I don't really care for
because they tend to be a little messy.
And we saw compound shapes in the previous chapter
which are great when you want
to mix and match different shape modes
such as add with minus front, that kind of thing.
But for day to day stuff,
it's a question between compound paths and groups.
Compound paths are useful when you want a group of objects
to share the same fill and stroke attributes,
whereas groups are more generalized containers
that can hold standard paths, compound paths,
compound shapes, and other groups.
And so currently, we've got this unstroked text here.
Ultimately, however, we want it to look like this
so that all the letters are stroked with black
or with white in a nice legible fashion
so that the strokes don't interrupt each other.
And as things stand right now,
that's not the effect we'd get,
and I'll show you what I mean.
I'll go ahead and switch back over to the ungrouped text,
and just to make it easier to select,
I will Alt + click, or Option + click
in the lock column for this text layer,
and that way I can just go ahead and marquee
these purple bird letters right there
and I'll press Ctrl + h or Command + h on a Mac
in order to hide the anchor points.
And now I'll just go up here to the control panel.
Notice we have a bunch of compound paths,
and that's what you get
when you convert a character of text
to path outlines inside Illustrator.
And that's what allows the text to have
these little holes inside of it.
And so I'm just gonna change the stroke weight here
to 2.5 points like so, and I'll make sure
that we have black selected for the color, which we do.
Now I'll click on the word Stroke,
and I'll switch the stroke to outside,
so we're going to align the stroke to the outside like so,
and then I'll go ahead and change the corner
to a round joint.
And while that looks pretty good,
that's not the effect I want
because notice each and every one of the letters
is overlapping the letter before it.
What I want is a shared stroke
as we're seeing in this example here.
Alright, so I'm going to go ahead and switch back over here.
What we need to do is group the letters together
and to demonstrate how that works
I'll just go ahead and press Ctrl + z,
or Command + z on a Mac,
a few times in order to restore
the original version of the document.
What a lot of folks do is
they establish groups and subgroups,
so in other words after I get done locking down
all the other layers by Alt or Option clicking
in that second column in front of the text layer,
a lot of folks will just go ahead and say,
okay, these guys want to be grouped together
and I'll press Ctrl + h, or Command + h on a Mac
to bring back the anchor points
just so that you can see I have all these letters selected,
and then they might group those
and then grab the top letters and group them,
and then grab both rows of text
and group them together.
So they have two groups inside of a subgroup.
Well, let me show you what that looks like over here
with the word Abilities.
So let's say, obviously I've made a kind of mistake
because the ies: are the wrong color,
but I'll just go ahead and marquee these letters
and press Ctrl + h, or Command + h on a Mac
to hide their anchor points.
And then I'll twirl open the text layer,
and you can see it's kind of a mess
with just too many items inside of it,
including all these letters here
down near the bottom of the stack.
If I go up to the Object menu and choose Group,
or of course I can press Ctrl + g, or Command + g on a Mac,
then I have this thing called a group,
by the way, that I can twirl open
to access all the items inside of it.
Which has its advantages,
but that's not the way I'm gonna go,
and let me show you why.
I'll press Ctrl + z, or Command + z on a Mac,
to undo that change,
and even though these guys are a bunch of compound paths,
I can put them into a single compound path.
I can basically fuse them into one compound path
as opposed to putting a bunch of compound paths
into another container.
And so notice, if I go to the Object menu,
choose Compound Path, and choose Make,
or you've got that keyboard shortcut
of Ctrl + 8, Command + 8 on a Mac.
The 8 is significant in that it is
the ultimate compound path with two holes in it.
I'll go ahead and choose that command,
and notice what happened to the ies:
They joined ranks with the other letters
because you can only have one set
of fill and stroke attributes associated
with a compound path.
Also notice here inside the layers panel,
it does not twirl open
and that's because insofar as Illustrator is concerned,
this is one path outline
with a bunch of subpaths inside of it.
If you want access to the subpaths,
you can switch to the wide arrow tool of course,
or possibly more easily,
you can just double-click on one of these letters
and now notice each one of these items--
I'll press Ctrl + h, or Command + h on a Mac
to bring back the anchor points.
Each one of these items is its own subpath now.
So we don't have a bunch
of compound paths inside of another one,
we just have one compound path.
Which has a certain sleekness and elegance
as we're about to see.
Anyway, I'll just go ahead and escape out
and I'll grab this guy right there,
and as opposed to marqueeing all these other path outlines,
all I have to do is click on Select Symbol or Objects
to select all those guys,
and then I'll combine them into a single compound path.
Witness here in the layers panel
that there's a ton of paths working together here.
I'll combine them together by pressing Ctrl + 8,
or Command + 8 on a Mac,
and we now have a single compound path.
And now what I'll do is group these guys together,
and this time I need to use a group
because we have different
fill and stroke attributes going on
and so if I want to maintain
those fill and stroke attributes,
then I have to go to the Object menu and choose Group
as opposed to choosing that compound path command.
And so I'll go ahead and do that
by pressing Ctrl + g, or Command + g on a Mac.
Now we have a group that you can twirl open
and do with as you please.
Alright, now I'm gonna press Ctrl + 0,
or Command + 0 on a Mac to zoom out.
I'll just go ahead and marquee these letters
'cause that is after all the easiest thing
to do at this point.
And notice here in the layers panel
that it's a big mess, there's tons of letters sitting here.
I'll press Ctrl + 8, or Command + 8 on a Mac
in order to fuse them together
into a single compound path,
this guy up here at the top of the stack.
And then I'll marquee these letters
and press Ctrl + 8, or Command + 8 on a Mac
in order to fuse them into a single compound path.
And then I'll just Shift + click on the second row,
the yellow letters, and I'll go to the Object menu
and choose Group, or press Ctrl + g,
or Command + g on a Mac in order to combine them
into a single group that I can twirl open
and modify as I like.
Alright, one more thing I want you to note about groups.
I'm going to go ahead and click off those path outlines
to deselect them,
and I will twirl open the Abilities group right here.
And let's say this guy I decide
doesn't want to be in a group anymore.
I don't even have to target him,
I'll go ahead and deselect him there.
I can just drag him.
I can just grab this and drag him out of the group
and he's no longer part of the group.
And as you can see, if I click on him,
he is independently selectable.
If you decide to get rid
of the last item in a group,
like this right here,
then the group will automatically dissolve
as you saw just happen.
If you don't want that to occur,
then press Ctrl + z, or Command + z on a Mac
in order to undo that change.
And if you then decide you want this guy
to be part of this group,
you can just drag him and drop him onto it
and now he's in that first group
which is no good, that's not what I want.
So I'll press Ctrl + z, or Command + z on a Mac
to undo that change.
And instead I'll drag him and drop him
into this group.
And I can even change the stacking order
of items inside of individual groups
just by dragging them here inside the layers panel
after which point I'll go ahead
and press Ctrl + Shift + a,
or Command + Shift + a on a Mac
to deselect my artwork.
Alright, so that's the primary distinction
between compound paths which are sleek, elegant,
and possess shared fill and stroke attributes,
and groups which are free-for-all containers.
But there's more, as we're about to see
in the next movie.