Illustrator® CS4 For Dummies®

Chapter 6. Selecting and Editing Paths

In This Chapter

• Discovering different methods of selection

• Selecting objects, points, and groups

• Adding to and taking away from selections

• Using the Magic Wand tool

• Selecting without tools

• Understanding the Select menu

• Fine-tuning points

To change — edit — a path in Illustrator, you have to first select it. In fact, 99 percent of the time, you can't make any changes at all to a path unless it's selected. Some exceptions are when you change Document Color Mode (see Chapter 1) and when you use the Pen tool to continue on an existing path (see Chapter 7). Every other action, though, requires that you make a selection first.

As I talk about earlier, making a selection in Illustrator says, "From this moment forward, I want to change this part of the artwork and nothing else." You're targeting a point, a path, an object, or objects for change. And with Illustrator's wide variety of selection tools and commands, you can target everything from a single point to your entire document. Changes you make — size, rotation, fill or stroke colors, and so on — simultaneously affect everything that you select. (If the term path makes you visualize a narrow walkway through a forest instead of a line with little dots and squares on it, head back to Chapter 2 for a quick refresher.)

This chapter tells you what you can do with those paths, as in how to select them and how to ...