Hi, this is Anne from Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you how to measure
a line segment or a curved line in Adobe Illustrator. And this might be good if you're
looking to make some technical drawings or maybe like a sewing pattern, or just anything where you
need to be really, really exact. All right, let's get started. So I'm here in Illustrator, and I've
already got a bunch of objects on my screen. If you want to know the distance around an object,
all you'll need to do is select it. You'll go to Window>Document Info, and in that window, you'll
go to the flyout and choose Objects. It'll tell you how many paths you currently have selected,
and the length of them, which is 557.3 points. If you're looking for a different unit like
inches or something like that, you can't hit CMD R and change it here. I mean, you can change it,
but it'll only change your rulers. You'll have to hit CMD K, or CTRL K on a PC and then go to Units
and choose it here. We'll change it to inches and say OK. And then we'll probably have to
select it again, just so the document info can update. And we can see that the distance around
this is 7.74 inches. Now let's say we want to know only what this little piece right here,
this part of the neck of the beaker - how tall that is. So to do that, I'll hit A on my keyboard,
and I'm going to just select that piece. I'll copy it and paste it. And now we can see that that is
.457 inches. If I only select it, it's going to give me the measurement of the entire piece,
so it's measuring the entire path. Now Illustrator can also tell us like the distance from here
all the way over to here. You would use your A Tool to select all the points inside that area,
and then copy and paste. We can hit D on our keyboard to just see it a little easier,
and then we'll come back up here to our Document Info, and we can see that this is 3.36 inches
from here all the way around to here. If we hit Z on our keyboard and zoom in, you'll see that
the part that is measuring does not include this outermost area or the innermost... it',
it's right in between them, and that's because it's a stroke. So let's draw a circle, and I'll
show you what I mean. I'll hit L on my keyboard, and I'll hold SHIFT and then just draw a circle.
And it shows that our length is 9.08 inches. Let's increase our stroke to...let's
put it at 10. Now it's still showing the same measurement, but if we want that outer
measurement, we're going to have to expand the stroke. So to do that, we'll go to Object>Expand.
And we'll do Fill and Stroke and say OK. Now we can hold down OPT and CMD or CTRL and ALT on a PC,
click off and then only select that outer path. And now you can see that that one is 9.52 inches.
All right, so let's say we're making this illustration, and our client says, "I want
the neck of the triangle test tube to be .6 high, and then everything else scaled proportionally."
So first, we would need to measure the distance of just the neck part like we did.
And then we would have to kind of do some algebra. So I'm going to make a little equation real quick.
We've got our before measurement, which is .457. That is the height of the neck. And we want our
after measurement to be .6. Now we can select all the pieces and just go up to our Transform
and find out how tall the entire piece is, and it is this tall.
So that is before. And now we don't really know what to put here. So I'll just put N here.
So right now, when I group all this, it's about 3.2 inches. So now we'll cross multiply. We'll
multiply this times this. That is 3.1816, times .6, and then we'll divide by this.
And our answer is 4.177. So in this case, N equals 4.177. Sorry to bust out the algebra on you guys,
but this is the best way that I know to do a calculation like this. So I'll select everything
and then come up here to Transform. Make sure this is selected so it constrains them, and we'll
change our height to 4.177. Now we'll check to see if it worked. I'll select this little piece,
copy and paste it. And now we'll look at our Document Info. And so yes, it is .6 now,
instead of .457. Now another thing to note is that this won't work on embedded objects.
So if you bring a photo into Illustrator, you won't be able to see any stuff in here.
But you can always come down here and go to Embedded or Linked Images.
It'll give you the measurement around the bounding box of that image. And that's all it can really
do because you're bringing in a raster image. All right, if you like the way I teach, I have
a few classes out there on Skillshare. And I also have a two-week free trial link in my description.
So if you want to take a look at that and check it out, you can take all my classes for free
if you do it in the two-week period. All right, I'll see you in the next video. Thank you!!!