- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to begin drawing
the outline of the main portion of the factory here
using the line segment tool.
All right, so I'll go ahead and switch over
to these random lines here.
Obviously I don't want them.
They're just here for the sake of demonstration.
So to get rid of them,
I'll go up to the Select menu and choose the All command.
Or you can just press that keyboard shortcut
of control a here on the PC or command a on a Mac.
And then I'll just go ahead and press
the backspace key or the delete key
in order to get rid of those lines.
But notice it still leaves us with the lines layer
here inside the Layers panel.
All right, now to create the first portion
of the inclined roof of the factory,
I'll go ahead and click some place
in the right portion of the document
along this horizontal guideline.
And that'll bring up the
Line Segment Tool Options dialogue box.
At which point I'm going to change the length value
to 100 points,
and then also notice in addition
to entering a numerical angle value,
you can drag here inside this angle widget.
But I'm looking for a very specific value of 90 degrees,
which is going to give us a vertical line,
at which point I'll click okay,
and notice that the line emanates from our click point.
All right now I want to draw a diagonal line
from this point right here,
and depending on which version of Illustrator you're using,
you may be able to get away with it.
But if you're using the very newest version,
which includes smart lines,
likes these right here,
then dragging from this point isn't going to create a new line,
it's going to modify the existing line,
which is not what we want.
So I'll just go ahead and press control z
or command z on the Mac to undo that change.
And then I'll go up to the Select menu
and choose the Deselect command,
which has a very similar keyboard shortcut
to the All command.
Notice that instead of control or command a,
it's control shift a here on a PC,
or command shift a on a Mac.
So the shift key essentially
reverses the shortcut's behavior.
At which point I can now drag from this top point like so
without harming the deselected line.
All right now I'm looking for an angle value of 205 degrees.
Can you see that in that head's up display.
And you want to just maximize the distance value
as far as you can go
without reducing the angle value to 204 degrees.
And for me, when I'm zoomed out like this,
that happens at a distance value of 240.75 points.
And the result is this line right here.
All right, now I want to go ahead and
select both of the lines.
And the best way to do that is to switch
to the black arrow tool,
which Illustrator calls the Selection Tool
up here at the top of the toolbox.
So here's the idea.
The black arrow tool selects entire objects,
whereas the white arrow tool,
or if you prefer the Direct Selection Tool,
selects partial objects,
including individual anchor points.
Now in your case, both tools are
most likely missing their stems,
so that they appear less like arrows
and more like arrowheads,
but the change is strictly cosmetic.
The tools still work the way they always have.
All right, I want to select all these objects,
so we'll just go ahead and grab that Selection Tool,
and then I'll at least partially marquee
these two lines, like so, to select them.
Now notice that I'm seeing my lines
surrounded by a rectangular bounding box,
which can be useful for applying quick transformations.
For example, if I drag this corner handle right there,
I'm going to stretch the shapes like so.
Or if I move my cursor slightly outside the bounding box,
not too far away, just slightly beyond one of these corners.
I'll see a rotate cursor,
at which point I can drag in order to rotate the shapes.
But it turns out there's better ways
to apply transformations.
Which includes scaling and rotating inside Illustrator.
So I'm going to press control z or command z on a Mac
a couple of times to reinstate my original lines there.
And I'm going to turn the bounding box off
because most of the time I find
that it just gets in the way.
And you do that by going up to the View menu
and choosing Hide Bounding Box.
You also have this keyboard shortcut,
in case you're interested in hiding it sometimes
and showing it others, of control shift B
or command shift B on the Mac.
And so what that allows me to do is
then drag these two lines by this point right here,
this anchor point, like so.
Because otherwise, if I was still looking
at the bounding box,
note I'll just go ahead and redo this operation here.
And I'll bring back the bounding box
using the keyboard shortcut of control shift b
or command shift b on the Mac.
If I try to drag by that anchor point
then I end up stretching the lines,
which is not what I want.
So again, I'll go ahead and undo that change.
I'll press control shift b or command shift b on the Mac
to turn off the bounding box.
And then I'll just go ahead and drag this anchor point
over to the intersection of the two guides like so,
at which point my arrowhead cursor right there
is going to turn white to indicate that I have a snap.
And so that's what guides do inside of Illustrator.
They snap your lines and other path outlines into place.
And just to make sure I'm moving
these lines exactly horizontally
I'll go ahead and press and hold the shift key.
And you want to keep that key down 'til after you release,
in order to snap those lines into alignment with our guides.
All right, so that's how you precisely draw and align
two straight lines in Illustrator.
In the next movie, we'll duplicate those lines
in order to create the zig-zag roof.