- [Instructor] In this movie I'll show you
how you can symbols to create custom arrowheads
inside Illustrator.
And this is a really old school trick.
It dates back to Illustrator 6.0,
but it works just as well today.
And when I say custom arrowheads
I mean arrowheads that you can apply from the Stroke panel.
So for example, let's say I select this line right here
and I click on the word Stroke up here in the control panel
and I click on this first Arrowheads option.
You can see that by default I have a very long list
of arrowheads, 39 in all.
And I can select any one of them to apply it to,
in this case, the beginning of the path.
Now while 39 arrowheads is a lot,
that doesn't mean that any one of them is necessarily
gonna be the arrowhead that you're looking for.
In which case, you can create custom arrowheads of your own.
And here's how it works.
The first thing you need to do
is locate the arrowheads file.
So here on the PC you follow this path right here,
so you go to the C drive presumably,
assuming that you installed Illustrator on your C drive,
then you go into the Program Files folder,
the Adobe subfolder, and so forth.
Now the two pieces that might vary
are en_US here at the end,
that's English US,
which is specifically gonna be
for the English US version of the program.
If you're using some regionalized version
then this subfolder would presumably be different.
The other big difference is gonna depend
on which specific version of Illustrator
you're working with.
So right now I'm working with Illustrator CC 2017,
but this could easily be a future version of the software
or it could be 2015 or 2015.3
depending on which version, once again, you're using.
And so what you wanna do, if you're working on a PC,
is go ahead and double-click on this line of type right here
and then just select all of this blue text
and go up to the Edit menu and choose the Copy command
or you can just press Control + C or Command + C on the Mac.
And then go ahead and open a folder window
and click up here in an empty portion of this path bar
and press Control + V or Command + V on the Mac
in order to paste that path.
Again, if you're working in a different version
of the software you'll need to change this version number.
It could be 2015, it could be 2015.3,
it could be a later version of the software,
but in my case it's 2017.
And so I'll just go ahead and enter that.
Also, by the way, if you're working
in a regionalized version of the program
you may just wanna get rid of this \en_US
and just end it with Resources, like so.
At which point you may see
some other subfolder sitting here,
double-click on it,
and then you should find a file called Arrowheads.ai.
So you may have to dig around for this thing.
Anyway, turns out I found it.
Now I'll come back to it just a moment,
but first I'm gonna return to Illustrator,
so that I can show you for those Macintosh users out there
you wanna go to the Macintosh Finder,
choose the Go To command from the Go menu,
and then type in this information.
So forward slash instead of back slash,
go ahead and select all this information,
copy it.
Again, there's the caveat that it might be CC 2015,
or CC 2015.3, or CC 2018, 19, 20,
don't know how far this is gonna go.
And then finally, of course,
that subfolder may be different.
But in any case, just go ahead and enter this stuff,
press the Enter key,
and you should find that arrowheads file.
Now what I recommend you do once you've found it
is a couple of different things.
First of all, you wanna make a backup,
just in case something gets messed up.
So go ahead and copy this file
to a different folder on your hard drive,
just so you've got it backed up.
But remember, you do need it to be in this specific folder
for it to actually work.
All right, next what you wanna do
is unlock the file by right-clicking on it
and choosing the Properties command
or on the Mac you would right-click
and choose the Get Info command,
which has a keyboard shortcut of Command + I.
In which case you're gonna see one of two dialog boxes,
depending on your platform.
And I have both of them open here under Photoshop.
Notice on the PC you'll get this Properties dialog box
and you wanna turn off the Read-only checkbox.
And then click the Apply button and then click OK.
And you'll have to be running
an as administrator, incidentally,
and this might not be enough.
I'll come back to that in just a moment.
On a Mac you would drop down to this little lock icon
in the bottom right corner of the Info panel
and click on it to unlock it.
At which point you'll be prompted for a password.
And then whatever names you see over here
on the left hand side of this list down here
at the bottom of the panel,
go ahead and change the privileges
for everybody to Read & Write.
And then you can just go ahead and close this panel.
Now that should be enough on a Mac.
On the PC you may need to go a little farther,
but I figure this is a mastery course,
so you're ready for it.
Anyway, I'm gonna double-click on this Arrowheads.ai file
in order to open it here inside Illustrator.
You've got some directions up here at the top
and then you have all 39 of the default arrowheads
here in the main body of the artwork.
Notice over here in the Layer panel
that we have a couple of layers.
One's called Layer 1 and the other's called Layer 5.
I would just leave those alone, by the way,
if I were you.
What we're gonna do is create some new arrowheads
down here at the bottom of the document.
So go ahead and switch over to the Artboard Tool,
which you can get by pressing Shift + O,
not zero, but the letter O.
Then go up here to the control panel
and select this top right point
in the little Reference Point matrix,
and then click at the end of the H value
and just enter plus 100, like so,
and press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac
to accept that change.
And then press the Escape key
in order to switch back to the black arrow tool.
Now what I want you to do is go up to the File menu
and choose the Save command
just to make sure things are working.
And so that's gonna be Control + S or Command + S on a Mac.
Now on a Mac everything should work fine,
but here on the PC I'm getting this alert message
telling me I can't save the illustration,
it might be a read only file
or there's some permissions problem
or blah, blah.
I'm just gonna click OK.
Here's the solution.
This is the DEFCON solution for you PC users.
You Macintosh users,
if that Control + S just worked for you,
then you can go ahead and skip to the next movie.
All right, so for those of you on a PC
where things are not working
I want you to go up to the File menu
and choose the Exit command
or just press Control + Q.
And you don't wanna save anything,
so just click No for everybody here.
And you can clear the clipboard if you want.
It really doesn't matter.
All right, now what I want you to do,
notice that I'm looking at the contents
of that en_US subfolder.
What I wanna do is click on this double arrowhead icon
right there and back out to the Adobe Illustrator CC
whatever folder in order to find
the actual application icon.
This is actually a shortcut to it,
but that's good enough.
Right-click on it and choose Run as administrator.
You may have to enter a password,
in my case I'm just seeing the splash screen
as the program launches.
All right, now at this point
I can't make double-clicking on a file work,
so I'm gonna go up to the File menu
and choose the Open command,
or you have that shortcut of Control + O.
And then I'm gonna navigate my way
to that Arrowheads file once again.
If it's not coming up right
then go ahead and find my Exercise File,
which is located here in the 36 symbols subfolder
and it's called Where to find the Arrowheads file.ai,
which I think is a pretty appropriate name.
I'll go ahead and restore
the single column version of the toolbox
and I have this constant problem
where my Layers panel is collapsed,
so I'll just click on its tab in order to bring it back up.
And then I'll go ahead and double-click
on this text right there and I'll select this line of type
and press Control + C or Command + C on a Mac
in order to copy it.
Then I'll press the Escape key,
I'll return to the File menu and choose the Open command.
So as I say, this is a little bit of a hassle.
But I think you're up to it.
So I'm gonna go ahead and click on this path bar,
but not on one of these items,
but in this empty area right there,
and I'll press Control + V or Command + V on a Mac
to paste that directory path,
then I'll press the Enter key or the Return key
in order to go to that folder.
And I'll double-click on the Arrowheads.ai file
and I'll go ahead and scroll upward, like so.
I'll press Shift + O to switch to the Artboard Tool,
which is located down here at the bottom of the toolbox.
I'll confirm that the top left point is selected
in the little Reference Point matrix.
I'll click after the H value right there
and enter plus 100 and then press the Enter key
or the Return key on a Mac.
I'll press the Escape key
to escape out of the artboard editing mode,
and I'll go up to the File menu
and I'll choose the Save command.
And this time everything works.
And that's because, once again, I'm running Illustrator
as an administrator.
All right, so that's a fairly complicated first step.
That is to say, finding and figuring out a way to modify
the top secret Arrowheads.ai file.
But now that we've taken care of that nonsense
I'll show you how we can use symbols
to create custom arrowheads
starting in the very next movie.