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Illustrator Tip #1: Dotted Lines in Illustrator

By Tony Soh Posted on April 16th, 2008

You can get interesting dotted lines with your Stroke Palette. Open up your Stroke Palette from Window>Stroke. Draw a line and select it. Enter the dash and gap value as shown. Experiment with different dash and gap values for different effects. To create a square dotted line, make sure the dash and weight is the same value.

So how about circle dotted lines? Here’s the trick. Select the Round Cap and make sure dash is set to 0 pt. For gap enter a value twice the stroke weight. This will give you a nice circle dotted lines.

Bonus Tip: To expand the dotted lines, you realise Object>Expand doesn’t work. Choose Object>Flatten Transparency to expand it. You can now fill each dots with different colors.

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Tags: dotted lines, Illustrator, line, tips

About The Author: admin

Hi. I'm the founder of Vector Diary. Illustrator is my passion and I have written numerous tutorials on illustrator helping people learn illustrator. My most popular tutorial on learning illustrator in 30 days has been a hit. It makes learning illustrator so easy and has benefited more than 20,000 people worldwide. Also, I've revealed some of my secret techniques in the premium tutorials. So don't forget to check it out!

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+Add Comment15 Comments

1. 
   Raadheesh September 16th, 2008

   what a wonderful Site and Tutorials !

2. 
   Raymond Selda January 2nd, 2009

   Exactly what I needed! Thank you for this tip!

3. 
   Russell Wilson February 20th, 2009

   Great tutorial! Thanks!

4. 
   Daniel Matias March 6th, 2009

   Amazing! Not only the info, but the way you explain it! Thanks from Madrid!
   All the site…wonderfull!

5. 
   adzril March 18th, 2009

   nice! its been a long time to search a simple and useful tutorial like this.

6. 
   O April 1st, 2009

   Exactly what i was looking for.

7. 
   lokate April 8th, 2009

   thanks so much. this is such a help!

8. 
   Means A Lot April 16th, 2009

   Thanks so much for the tip! I was going crazy trying to figure out how to do a dotted line.

9. 
   Kelly Sexton April 18th, 2009

   Gosh! Thank you! I felt like a retard not being able to figure it out. You would think it would just be a line style or some other obvious application considering the simplicity…

10. 
    e May 6th, 2009

    cheers!
    was driving me crazy!
    just what i needed!

11. 
    Leks June 4th, 2009

    Thanks!

12. 
    Kim Young June 25th, 2009

    Thanks!

13. 
    Jazz October 4th, 2009

    Thanks! I needed a refresher after not using Illustrator for so long!

14. 
    Chaos January 5th, 2010

    you’d think something like this would be easy to do…. thank you so much your site is a great resource.

15. 
    Serendipity January 11th, 2010

    Finally! Such a simple task, thanks for explaining the post!