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Using Adobe Illustrator, how can I evenly distribute a group of objects along an arc?

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Do the objects all have identical width and height? – Alexei Dec 14 '11 at 20:41

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Have you tried using the making two instance of an object (e.g., a circle) and then going to Object > Blend > Make to make a Blend?

You can modify the spacing and orientation via Object > Blend > Blend Options.

You can attach it to a path by selecting the Blend (the one you made previously) and the path and going to Object > Blend > Replace Spline.

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It's not exactly what I wanted to do, which was to take a group of objects without blending them and line them up against a pre-existing line, but it looks like this doing this and then modifying the spline of the blend is the Illustrator Way. Thanks! – Dan Monego Dec 14 '11 at 22:03
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That's a really good question.

A quick and dirty way to to cheat is to create your arc and put type along it (for example, 1, 1, 1, 1), and then letterspace them evenly (literally, hit the space bar the same number of times between each character). Turn the whole thing into guides and align your items to the characters. Imprecise, but it should get you close.

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In that scenario, I'd probably play with tracking as more exact and simple to manipulate. – Alan Gilbertson♦ Dec 14 '11 at 22:14
In fact that would be brain dead easy to do in InDesign, where one can put any graphics as a "glyph" using "text on path"… – thebodzio Dec 14 '11 at 23:48
Also, instead of "spacing" the characters or modifying their tracking, it's much easier to use "full justification" granted "start" and "end" markers are on both ends of path. – thebodzio Dec 14 '11 at 23:54
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The most general case I can think of (not to detract from Krazer's excellent suggestion) is to put a stroke on your path temporarily and use the "Dashed Line" option to create a 1 pt. dash with a large value for the gap. Adjust the gap value until you have the correct number of dots on your arc, and use these to align the objects.

There is an option to align the dashes to ends and corners. If you keep that turned on Illustrator will make subtle adjustments to ensure that you have a dot at each end of the arc and even spacing between.

This is one situation in which InDesign scores over Illustrator, because it allows inline objects to be pasted into a text path and manipulated with Justification, Tracking, etc., just as if they were text characters.

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If these objects are identical, you can make a "scatter brush". This solution is not panaceum and needs tweaking if you want to have specific number of elements or elements exactly on both ends of the shape. Anyway it's quite flexible :).

Example of scatter brush evenly distributed elements

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