Guide · Cutting
Work closer to faces and segments.
When a Boolean command is broader than the change you want, cut, split, trim, or pick faces directly.
The knife cuts across a drawing.
The knife divides a drawing along the cut you draw across it, producing separate paths from one. Use it when the dividing line is a gesture rather than an existing shape you could subtract.
The cut is resolved against the real curves, so the new endpoints land on the curve rather than on an approximation of it.
A future sequence will show the cut line, the resulting paths, and their new endpoints.
Scissors split without removing anything.
Scissors open a path at the point you pick instead of dividing an area. A closed path becomes open, and an open path becomes two pieces.
This is the tool for detaching a run of segments you want to move or restyle on its own, when nothing should be deleted in the process.
Trim removes the piece between two intersections.
Trim deletes the part of a segment that lies between two bounding intersections, the way an unwanted overhang is cleaned up after shapes are crossed.
If the segment you picked does not have two bounding intersections, the editor says so and the command does not run. There is no guess about which end was meant.
- Removes a bounded piece of a segment
- Requires two bounding intersections
- Reports the unmet condition instead of guessing
The shape builder works face by face.
Overlapping drawings divide the plane into faces. The shape builder lets you pick those faces directly and merge or remove them, which is often quicker than arranging a sequence of Boolean commands to reach the same figure.
It is the right tool when the target is easy to point at but awkward to describe as a union and subtraction of whole shapes.