Special Edition Using Adobe® Illustrator® 10

Chapter 4. Creating and Editing Paths

In This Chapter

• Paths and Vector Art

• How Anchor Points Shape Paths

• The Pen Tools

• Editing Paths

• More Path Creation Tools

• Additional Path-Related Tools

• Non-Object Paths in Illustrator

• Illustrator’s Auto Trace Tool

• Troubleshooting

Paths and Vector Art

Illustrator is a vector art program. While it allows you to do some rather advanced work with raster images and rasterized artwork, it is at heart a vector art program. (The difference between vector and raster is addressed later in the sidebar called “Vector and Raster,” as well as in Chapter 18, “Raster Images and Rasterized Artwork.”)

Vector art is based on the concept of paths. Each item is a path, and the path is stroked and/or filled to produce artwork. Without the path, ...