Illustrator CS5 Moves Objects
Here’s a headache: Adobe Illustrator CS5 uses the upper left corner of your document for the ruler origin, instead of the lower left as in previous versions. For new documents, this is just a change to get used to. But when opening older template files that have the ruler origin in a different place (such as the center of the document), the objects move to a new location!
Also, if you copy an object from a document whose ruler origin was set elsewhere (the center for example), then paste in front in new CS document, it uses the new origin.
One of our readers alerted us to this problem, which brought their workflow to a screeching halt. As far as we know, there is no solution.
In addition, any existing Action droplets (say, to generate GIFs for proofing) from Illustrator Actions also need to be rewritten to reset the rulers. For Adobe’s explanation of this behavior, see this blog post.
Jay Nelson is the editorial director of PlanetQuark.com, and the editor and publisher of Design Tools Monthly. He’s also the author of the QuarkXPress 8 and QuarkXPress 7 training titles at Lynda.com, as well as the training videos Quark includes in the box with QuarkXPress 7 . In addition, Jay writes regularly for Macworld and Photoshop User magazines and speaks at industry events.
If peoples want the old pre-cs5 behaviour for the rulers origins they can edit of the illustrator preferences file in a text editor.
Changes these two lines:
/isRulerOriginTopLeft 1
to
/isRulerOriginTopLeft 0
and
/isRulerIn4thQuad 1
to
/isRulerIn4thQuad 0
Jean-Claude: fantastic! Thanks for providing this workaround!
That’s a helpful fix, but it only fixes the direction of the rulers. It doesn’t fix pasting in place/front/back with respect to the rulers instead of with respect to the document.
Alakazaaminrfoatmion found, problem solved, thanks!
Ok, changing the preferences worked. Why on earth would Adobe do something so stupid. Oh wait. These are the folks that killed FreeHand.