Welcome to Vexy Linestra for Illustrator

Turn selected Adobe Illustrator artwork into editable vector lines, dots, contours, patterns, and geometric fills.

Vexy Linestra is a native plug-in for Adobe Illustrator on macOS and Windows. It brings the fourteen Linestra rendering styles directly into Illustrator as a non-destructive Live Effect. You can work from a placed photograph, embedded raster image, vector illustration, text, group, or compound path; choose a fill style; and refine the result without leaving your document.

The plug-in generates real Illustrator paths. It does not create an SVG, call a browser extension, or write temporary artwork files. The effect stays attached to the source object, so you can change its settings, move or scale the object, save and reopen the document, copy it, or remove the effect to return to the original appearance.

What You Can Do

  • Apply any of fourteen fills: Linear, Wave, Circular, Spiral, Halftone, Stipple, Hex, Contour, Low-Poly, Dither, Wireframe, Fractal, String Art, and ASCII.
  • Adjust Thickness, Spacing, Angle, and Organic amount with live preview.
  • Enter exact numeric values, measurement units, and simple expressions when a slider is not precise enough.
  • Choose a dedicated static result color with Illustrator's native color picker.
  • Enable Dynamic Color to sample colors from the source artwork.
  • Reopen an existing effect from the Appearance panel and continue editing it.
  • Apply one setting to several selected objects at once.
  • Expand the appearance when you need ordinary Illustrator paths for direct editing.

How the Effect Reads Artwork

Linestra rasterizes the selected object's current appearance in memory and uses its visible tone, color, and transparency as the signal. Darker opaque areas generally produce stronger or denser marks. Transparent areas contribute less. With Dynamic Color enabled, the generated geometry also samples the source colors.

The internal signal is capped at 1024 pixels on its longest side. This keeps complex fills responsive while preserving the selected object's Illustrator-point dimensions for the generated vector geometry.

Start Here

If this is your first time using the plug-in:

  1. Read Installation.
  2. Follow Getting Started to create a first effect.
  3. Review Panel & Controls and Basic Controls.
  4. Browse Fill Modes for the character of each style.
  5. Read Color & Appearance before combining source styling with Dynamic Color.

System Requirements

The current release supports Adobe Illustrator 28.7 or newer.

  • On macOS, it requires macOS 11 or later and runs natively on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.
  • On Windows, it runs as a native 64-bit plug-in on Windows x64.

Create your first effect in Getting Started.