Graphic Design Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Graphic Design professionals, students, and enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I'm trying to delete part of a dashed line in Illustrator (I marked the part that I want to remove with a red rectangle).
The Dashed line was created by an horizontal line tool with Zig-Zag effect, so the anchors are as seen here:
I've tried the eraser tool, mark a line and then use pathfinder, lasso tool to select the part I want to remove but none of them worked.
Any suggestions?
Thank you!
If you want to keep the line without expanding, i mean the horizontal line with the zig zag effect, you can add a transparency mask to the line:
Select the line and click on "Make mask", uncheck "Clip" and select the mask area, the square at the right of the window.
Draw a 100% black shape on the area you want to hide, and click back the left square of the window to go back to the editing shape area of the file.
And that's it
Use the Pen Tool to add an anchor point to the path where you want to cut it.
Then use the Direct Selection Tool to select the end anchor point:
Hit the Delete key:
There are other ways...
All the methods essentially involve the same amount of clicks/keypresses so no one is better than another.
But with any of them, you must have the path selected.
Based upon Question update. An effect has been applied. Therefore, you must expand the effect... Object > Expand Appearance... or guess at where you want to cut the line and cut the actual path (the blue line), not the preview with the effect.
Object > Expand Appearance.. or guess at where you want to cut the line and cut the actual path (the blue line), not the preview with the effect.
Select the blue line and then Object>Expand, Object>Expand (yes, do it twice, the second time make sure "Fill and Stroke" are selected)
Select the line and then Right Click>Release Compound Path
Select the line and Ungroup
You may now delete individual dashes.
