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- In this movie, I'll
show you how to align

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a whole mess of path
outlines to the artboard.

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And the result will be this
centered factory right here.

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Alright, so the first
thing I'm going to do

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is close this little toolbar
associated with the line tools

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because we're done with it.

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And just so we don't ruin the
contents of this lines layer,

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given that we've spent so
much time working on it,

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let's go ahead and duplicate that layer

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by clicking on the flyout menu icon

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in the upper right corner
of the layers panel

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and then choosing duplicate lines

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in order to create a copy of it.

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Now I want you to double click

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on an empty portion of this layer

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to bring up the layer
options dialogue box.

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And I'm going to go ahead and
rename this layer centered.

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And I'm going to change its color as well.

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And your choice of color, by the way

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affects the color of anchor points

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and segments when they're selected.

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So that's why all of our anchor points

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were looking red throughout this movie

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is because the lines layer is set to red.

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So you can select green or
any other color you like,

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but I'm a big fan of gold

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so I'll go ahead and choose
gold and then click okay.

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And we end up with this effect right here.

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Alright, now just to protect
the contents of the lines layer

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I'll turn it off by clicking on its eye

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so that we only have one layer visible

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and that is centered and nothing else.

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Alright, now what you want to do

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is select all of the path outlines

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by going into the select menu
and choosing the all command

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or you could just press control
a or command a on the Mac.

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Now click on the word align

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in order to bring up the align panel.

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Make sure align to is
set to align to artboard.

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And then go ahead and click
horizontal align center

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and that ruins everything.

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And the reason is that Illustrator

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is centering each path
outline independently

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which is obviously not what we want.

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So go ahead and press control z

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or command z on the Mac
to undo that change.

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The solution is to group all
of these path outlines together

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by going up to the object menu

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and choosing the group command

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which has a straightforward
keyboard shortcut

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of control g or command g for group.

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And what that does is it tells Illustrator

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that all of these path
outlines are one big object.

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And now you can return
to the control panel,

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make sure align to right here
is set to align to artboard

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and then click on horizontal align center

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and then click on vertical align center.

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And that last one really
doesn't appear to do anything.

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And that's because
Illustrator is centering

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the path outlines as opposed to

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the way the path outlines look.

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So as a result, this big thick stroke

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that's assigned to the smoke
is sticking up way to far.

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The solution to that is to
go up to the window menu

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and choose the align command

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to bring up the dedicated
align panel right here.

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And then you want to click
on its flyout menu icon

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and choose use preview bounds.

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You would never know that that's

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the top secret option, but there it is.

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Go ahead and choose that
command to make it active.

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And now if you click on
horizontal align center,

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you'll see a slight difference.

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The factory's going to move
over to the right a little bit

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because of the thick stroke
associated with the spiral

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and then go ahead and click
on vertical align center

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and you'll see all of
the artwork drop down

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at which point you have a couple
of options available to you

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One is to just hide the panel.

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The other is just in case, go ahead

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and turn use preview bounds back off

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because you don't always want it to be on.

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There are times where it's better

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if you're just aligning the
path outlines and nothing more.

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And then having done that, go
ahead and hide the align panel

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and click off the path
outlines to deselect them.

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And that's how you align a
whole bunch of path outlines

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by first grouping them
here inside Illustrator.