hacking the tool

Woo. I finally got around to hacking up some keyboard shortcuts to change stroke weights in Illustrator. It is a horrible mess involving having Quicksilver trigger an Applescript when I hit command-option-control-[/] but it works – I mash the modifiers and hit [, and the size of my stroke decreases by 25%; modifier-mash plus ] increases it by a third. Which is close enough to the inverse of the decreasing to make me happy.

For further ugly hackery, I have bound the touch strip on my tablet to trigger those keys when I’m in Illustrator.

At some point in the future I might want to prettify the stroke weights it ends up with – a weight of 1.0002 points is not pretty – but for now I’m just going to enjoy actually being able to control this at small values without typing a number into the stroke palette. Which is a thing I find myself doing a hell of a lot when using art brushes.

Anyway, if you want ’em, download them here and have fun: Illustrator stroke width scripts

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