Mitering Bug in Illustrator CS4?

Question

I finally bit the bullet and moved from Illustrator 10 to CS4 this winter. So far, it's been great! I don't regret it at all. On my very first project, though, I noticed that CS4 seems not to miter certain small paths correctly. At first I thought my geometry might not have been exact, but I opened the same file up in version 10 and the mitering is perfect. Has anyone else noticed this? I'm attaching two images of the same file, one opened in version 10 (with the mitering I had expected) and one in CS4 (with the incorrect mitering, circled in red).
I will add this to Wade's list too, but wanted to see if anyone else had had this problem. If not, where is the appropriate place to report a bug?

Answer 1

How were you able to get the coordinates of the direction handles?
The dialog shown in the screenshots is a Script Alert. It's one of a handful of very simple "get info" Javascripts I use to obtain specific info about selections when working on more elaborate scripts.
//--start script
var docRef=app.activeDocument;
var pathRef=docRef.selection[0];
var pointsRef=pathRef.pathPoints;
var pointsCount=pointsRef.length;
for(i=0;i<pointsCount;i++){
var pointRef=pointsRef[i];
var myReturn="\r";
if(pointRef.selected==PathPointSelection.ANCHORPOINT){
alert("Anchor "+i+" X: "+pointRef.anchor[0]+myReturn+
"Anchor "+i+" Y: "+pointRef.anchor[1]+myReturn+
"LeftDirection X: "+pointRef.leftDirection[0]+myReturn+
"LeftDirection Y: "+pointRef.leftDirection[1]+myReturn+
"RightDirection X: "+pointRef.leftDirection[0]+myReturn+
"RightDirection Y: "+pointRef.rightDirection[1]);
//--end script
And how were you able to numerically adjust them?
I didn't. See the guides in the second screenshot? I just snapped a horizontal ruler guide to the bottom of the extended handle and a vertical ruler giude to the anchorPoint. Then I snapped the handle to the intersection of the two guides.
What a cool feature that would be.
Javascripts can be used to set coordinates of anchorPoint anchors and handles. Some of my scripts do. But you would have to be carefully specific about what exactly you want the behavior of the script to be. For example:
FreeHand has for decades provided retract and extend buttons for incoming and outgoing handles. Those buttons would fix your specific problem with a mere couple of clicks. Illustrator only just very recently got around to providing point kind (corner or smooth) conversion buttons in its Control Panel--and those fall far short of the functionality and utility of FreeHand's treatment. The FreeHand functionality could be constructed in Javascript without too much difficulty (the auto-extend portion of it would be the trickiest), so I would think it should be a piece of cake to build it into the program.
But don't hold your breath. The program still can't join more than two open paths at a time, either.
By the way, five out of the twelve innermost points of your path are Smooth Points. Unfortunately, Illustrator's convert buttons retracts the handles when you convert to cornerPoints, and doesn't give you any option to specify otherwise. See that little Automatic checkbox in FreeHand's Object inspector? Also, note how easy it is to differentiate between selected corner (round) and curve (square) points in FreeHand:
If I had but one pathpoint selected, its position would be shown above, too. In fact, in this one tidy palette I can see and set important things about a selected path or pathpoint for which in Illustrator you have to visit the Appearance, Attributes, and (of all things) Document Info palettes.
JET