How can I tell illustrator to paste a copied pixel-perfect item in a pixel-perfect manner?

Question

My issue is that I have created a pixel-perfect shape. I copy it and I paste it into the same document, and it's pixel-perfectness is destroyed:

You can see that it was pasted at a very odd pixel value. Snap to pixel and Snap to point are enabled. Also all pixel snapping options are active:

Sure, in this example I can simply click on "Align selected art to pixels", but often I have more complex items, where clicking this button changes the shape.

In earlier Illustrator versions this was not an issue: Pasting always created pixel perfect results. At some point in time this seems to have changed or I am missing a setting.

Answer 1

There is no way to prevent this behaviour by default, and I have never found it helpful or intuitive.

Using Shift + Ctrl + V (paste in place) is the most reliable way to avoid problems.

Alternatively, you can:

1. Create a pixel-perfect bounding box around your artwork.
2. Group the box and your artwork.
3. Copy and paste the group.
4. Manually delete any fractional positional values on the group object, e.g. by rounding: Y: 15.2813px to Y: 15px.

This tedious process will restore the bounding box to its pixel-perfect state, and, in theory, should preserve your artwork too. This can be especially useful when copying and pasting between different apps e.g. XD to AI and vice versa.

The align selected art to pixel grid button is best avoided for shapes where it is desirable for anchor points to have a fractional positional value — it's just not smart enough to do a good job.