Drawing spirals
The Spiral tool creates a spiral-shaped object of a given radius and number of winds; that is, the number of turns that the spiral completes from start to finish. There are two ways to draw with the Spiral tool: you can drag to draw the spiral directly on the artboard or click to specify properties in a dialog box.
To draw a spiral by dragging: - Select the Spiral tool
. - Position the pointer at the center of the spiral you want to create, and drag until the spiral is the desired size.
You can press any of the following to get specific results as you drag: - Shift to constrain the tool to multiples of 45° or to the angle specified in the Constrain Angle text box in the General Preferences dialog box.
- The spacebar to move the spiral.
- The Up Arrow key or Down Arrow key to add or delete winds.
- Alt-drag (Windows) or Option-drag (Mac) to add or subtract winds while increasing the length of the spiral.
- Control-drag (Windows) or Command-drag (Mac) to change the decay.
- Drag the pointer in an arc to rotate the spiral.
To draw a spiral by specifying dimensions: - Select the Spiral tool.
- Click where you want the center of the spiral to be.
- Set any of the following options in the dialog box, and click OK:
- Radius to specify the distance from the center to the outermost point in the spiral.
- Decay to specify the amount by which each wind of the spiral should decrease relative to the previous wind.
- Segments to specify how many segments the spiral has. Each full wind of the spiral consists of four segments.
- Style to specify the direction of the spiral.
Note: By default, the Spiral dialog box displays the dimensions of the last spiral you drew. The unit of measure is determined by the unit of measure set in the Document Setup or Units & Display Performance Preferences dialog box.
To display or hide the center points: - Choose Window > Attributes.
- In the Attributes palette, click either the Show Center button
or the Don't Show Center button .
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