So there’s this side effect of Adobe’s attempt to retool Illustrator into something that can be driven entirely by a touchscreen: an uneditable, undeletable “Touch Calligraphic Brush” appears at the top of your brush palette.
This has annoyed me for a while, as I am pretty committed to driving it with keyboard and stylus. It’s not a huge annoyance, but it’s just this… intrusion… on my otherwise neatly-organized files. I finally decided to write it up as a bug.
In other news, this Purple Arrow I picked up at American Mary the other day on a budtender’s recommendation is some pretty good stuff.
******BUG******
Concise problem statement:
An uneditable, undeletable “Touch Calligraphic Brush” appears at the top of the Brush palette for every single document, including ones that predate touch devices. On my Macbook Air, which is not a touch device, with files that have never been loaded on a touch device.
Steps to reproduce bug:
1. Start Illustrator on a computer with no touchscreen.
2. Load a file or create a new one.
3. Try to edit the “Touch Calligraphic Brush”.
4. Try to delete the “Touch Calligraphic Brush”.
Results:
The Touch Calligraphic Brush stays there at the top of your brushes palette. It refuses to move. Refuses to let you change its settings. It mocks you every time you look at the brush palette, an unasked-for, unwanted squatter in the middle of your tools, like a toad that’s plopped itself down in the middle of your pencil box. It’s polite, as toads go. It doesn’t demand you feed it flies, it doesn’t excrete all over a work in progress and ruin it, it doesn’t even croak. But it’s always there right in the middle of where your tools are. And sometimes you put your hand on it when you reach for a pencil without really looking, and it’s all clammy, and gross, and why is this toad in the middle of my pencil box, taking up space I could keep drawing tools instead? When you call the people who make the pencil box, they tell you that, oh, yes, the toad has to be there for the benefit of people working in the exciting new medium of toad secretions, so that when they try to use a toad to draw with, there’s always a toad there, and this just leaves you (as an artist working in the medium of pen and ink) rather baffled as to why this means *everyone* has to have a toad in their pencil case now.
I mean, also sometimes the pencil box summons this five inch tall giraffe made of fire who burns your drawing up, and that’s something both you and the people who made this magical pencil box are more concerned with, but still. I just keep on putting my hand on this toad sometimes, and it’s just moderately annoying on a constant low level.
Expected results:
The Touch Calligraphic Brush acknowledges that its presence may be unnecessary or unwanted for some people, and lets you edit and delete it.
Or even better, perhaps the Touch Calligraphic Brush never even appears if you’re not on a touch device.