Hector Martin

I tried to use Adobe Illustrator today. This was a mistake. I spent **one hour** trying to fix a stray/misaligned anchor in a mesh object's edge before I gave up. No amount of Googling explained what the fuck was going on.

When I clicked on the mesh I could see some anchors and their handles, but moving the handles responded in strange ways, and moving handles and moving them back did not return the path to the same state. It did not behave even remotely the way bezier curves are supposed to.

Eventually, hovering over the edge I discovered some kind of "phantom anchors" that I could click on, and which seemed to define the mystery points messing up the edge, but which I could not delete without breaking the mesh, and which had no bezier handles to adjust.

I could not find a way to make the edge straight; I could also not find a tool to make the anchors that *were* visible corner/straight anchors. Eventually I discovered I could move the handles into the anchors, but even with no handles **it still wasn't a straight line**.

I also couldn't find any tool to align multiple handles vertically. And the kicker is that when I did a test PNG export, it had **holes**. Holes that did not exist in the vector. Blatant renderer glitches. Seriously.

All of this would've been three clicks in Inkscape: select the problem nodes, click the "make straight edge" button, click the "align vertically" button. Maybe click on and hit delete on any unnecessary nodes, though by then they wouldn't be a problem anyway.

After one hour I gave up, opened the AI file in PDF mode in Inkscape, and re-created the gradient meshes (which were the only thing that doesn't get imported properly). This took less than half the time I wasted trying and failing to fix **one edge** in Illlustrator.

I don't care what "it's a complicated program and you don't know what to use it" excuses people default to, if I can't open your vector editor and... figure out how to make a trivial change... in one hour... with Google searches... and export is broken... then it's garbage.