Its hard if you don't know how

[capezio]

Before I give up and have a break down I thought I would ask.

This Illustrator is driving me nuts. v9. Its all I have at mo, the only resource book I have is for CS2 Illustrator the Quick start.

However, I have a letter ' i ' which i have outlined, all I want to do is make it taller without making it heavier.

I think my problem is that I am trying to find a way of doing it like I would in Quark by cutting it in half with a picture box on top then item>merge>intersect. do that twice then grow the endpoints of one half then join them back together again and then remove unecessary points. 2 minute job.

I am here 2 hours later with this Illustrator fangled thing and have achieved
diddly squat. Oh how I wish I could find a course to help me get my head around this software. I am so frustrated I could scream

[Danger_Mouse]

Not sure what you mean....is this it?

http://img83.imageshack.us/img83/2856/tutsz3.th.jpg (http://img83.imageshack.us/my.php?image=tutsz3.jpg)

[capezio]

yes thats it. I was playing with that pathfinder palette but when I had split it I seemed to have 2 boxes around a single half and I couldn't get rid of one of them to get to the points.

When I do get to the points I find it so hard to manipulate them. Is it correct that you have to keep swapping between the covert anchor point tool (shift c) and the direct selection tool to move a point. Sometimes I manage it then the next time I get messages telling me I can't do it. I could do with knowing the step by step order of doing this.

Thanks for taking the time draw that guide. :)

[Danger_Mouse]

when you get that message you are may have just missed the node. Sometimes you have to click on another node first then reselect the desired one.

Manipulating anchor points takes some getting use to.

The guide took seconds so no probs.

[budafist]

There's an easier way.

use the white arrow tool and select the bottom half of the i by dragging a box over the bottom half with the wite arrow tool. This means that the bottom 2 points are selected. Now just press the down arrow on your keyboard. Holding shift down will speed it up.

Or you could do the oppposite by highligting the top half of the i with your white arrow and pushing up with your arrow button on your keyboard.

[urstwile]

Yup, Buda, that's the way I would do it. DangerMouse and capezio, not sure why Pathfinder is even necessary here, am I missing something?