- In this movie, I'll show you how to align
a whole mess of path outlines to the artboard.
And the result will be this centered factory right here.
Alright, so the first thing I'm going to do
is close this little toolbar associated with the line tools
because we're done with it.
And just so we don't ruin the contents of this lines layer,
given that we've spent so much time working on it,
let's go ahead and duplicate that layer
by clicking on the flyout menu icon
in the upper right corner of the layers panel
and then choosing duplicate lines
in order to create a copy of it.
Now I want you to double click
on an empty portion of this layer
to bring up the layer options dialogue box.
And I'm going to go ahead and rename this layer centered.
And I'm going to change its color as well.
And your choice of color, by the way
affects the color of anchor points
and segments when they're selected.
So that's why all of our anchor points
were looking red throughout this movie
is because the lines layer is set to red.
So you can select green or any other color you like,
but I'm a big fan of gold
so I'll go ahead and choose gold and then click okay.
And we end up with this effect right here.
Alright, now just to protect the contents of the lines layer
I'll turn it off by clicking on its eye
so that we only have one layer visible
and that is centered and nothing else.
Alright, now what you want to do
is select all of the path outlines
by going into the select menu and choosing the all command
or you could just press control a or command a on the Mac.
Now click on the word align
in order to bring up the align panel.
Make sure align to is set to align to artboard.
And then go ahead and click horizontal align center
and that ruins everything.
And the reason is that Illustrator
is centering each path outline independently
which is obviously not what we want.
So go ahead and press control z
or command z on the Mac to undo that change.
The solution is to group all of these path outlines together
by going up to the object menu
and choosing the group command
which has a straightforward keyboard shortcut
of control g or command g for group.
And what that does is it tells Illustrator
that all of these path outlines are one big object.
And now you can return to the control panel,
make sure align to right here is set to align to artboard
and then click on horizontal align center
and then click on vertical align center.
And that last one really doesn't appear to do anything.
And that's because Illustrator is centering
the path outlines as opposed to
the way the path outlines look.
So as a result, this big thick stroke
that's assigned to the smoke is sticking up way to far.
The solution to that is to go up to the window menu
and choose the align command
to bring up the dedicated align panel right here.
And then you want to click on its flyout menu icon
and choose use preview bounds.
You would never know that that's
the top secret option, but there it is.
Go ahead and choose that command to make it active.
And now if you click on horizontal align center,
you'll see a slight difference.
The factory's going to move over to the right a little bit
because of the thick stroke associated with the spiral
and then go ahead and click on vertical align center
and you'll see all of the artwork drop down
at which point you have a couple of options available to you
One is to just hide the panel.
The other is just in case, go ahead
and turn use preview bounds back off
because you don't always want it to be on.
There are times where it's better
if you're just aligning the path outlines and nothing more.
And then having done that, go ahead and hide the align panel
and click off the path outlines to deselect them.
And that's how you align a whole bunch of path outlines
by first grouping them here inside Illustrator.