Panel & Controls

A tour of the Vexy Linestra panel.

Open the Linestra panel, apply the effect with Effect → Vexy → Vexy Linestra, or double-click an existing Linestra row in the Appearance panel. The controls follow Illustrator's light or dark interface theme and UI scaling.

Fill Grid

The top of the panel contains fourteen icon buttons arranged in a compact grid. The active mode uses Illustrator's accent color. Its name appears in uppercase below the grid.

From left to right, the modes are:

  1. Linear
  2. Wave
  3. Circular
  4. Spiral
  5. Halftone
  6. Stipple
  7. Hex
  8. Contour
  9. Low-Poly
  10. Dither
  11. Wireframe
  12. Fractal
  13. String Art
  14. ASCII

Hover over an icon to see its name. Changing the fill updates an existing selected effect immediately.

Panel state follows the selection:

  • With no usable artwork selected, no fill is active and all controls are disabled.
  • When selected artwork has no Linestra effect, no fill is active. The fill buttons remain available, while the parameter and color controls stay disabled.
  • Click any fill button to add Linestra to ordinary selected artwork and enable its controls.
  • When exactly one object with Linestra is selected, the panel loads that effect's fill and stored settings automatically.

Parameter Rows

Six rows control geometry and source tone:

  • Thickness — base line width, dot size, edge weight, or glyph weight.
  • Spacing — distance, cell size, sampling interval, or complexity scale.
  • Angle — orientation for directional, grid, and text-based modes.
  • Organic — deterministic wobble, jitter, spacing variation, and irregularity.
  • Brightness — source-density offset from −100% to 100%.
  • Contrast — symmetric source-tone separation, shown as 50–200%.

Each row includes a slider and an editable numeric field. Slider movement previews live. Angle is displayed with °; Contrast and Brightness are displayed with %. The symbols are optional when typing. Press Up or Down to change the current value by 1, or Shift+Up/Down to change it by 10. Double-click a row's label icon to restore that control's default value.

Two compact menu buttons sit between the first two sliders and their values:

  • The button on the Thickness row chooses how source tone changes mark thickness: Linear, Fast, Threshold, 3 Steps, or 5 Steps.
  • The button on the Spacing row chooses stroke alignment: Center, Top, or Bottom. When Halftone is active, this button instead chooses Circle, Square, Rhomb, Triangle, or Star dots.

Hold Shift while dragging either Thickness or Spacing to move both values by the same amount. Each value remains inside its configured range.

Thickness and Spacing also accept Illustrator measurements and arithmetic expressions. A plain value uses Illustrator pixels; you can enter values such as 20 mm, 1 in, 12 pt, 10/3, or (8+4)*2. Illustrator converts the result into document geometry when you commit the field.

Thickness and Spacing begin with practical limits of 100 Illustrator pixels. The panel menu's Settings… command can raise either upper limit when a larger result is genuinely needed. The saved limit applies to the slider and its numeric editor; it does not change settings already stored in an effect.

Below Contrast, Source Levels uses two round handles matching the other sliders. The full-width track is solid black before the black point, changes from black to white between the handles, and remains white after the white point. The adjacent values are read-only, use the same text treatment as the numeric fields, and show the selected black and white points. Dragging either handle remaps source tone with live preview. Double-click its label icon or the control itself to restore 10–245. Thin separators distinguish the source-processing and color groups. The entire control follows Illustrator's interface scaling together with the rest of the panel.

When controls are disabled, slider and Source Levels handles remain opaque and use a theme-aware gray. The panel background never shows through disabled handles.

See Basic Controls for detailed ranges and mode-specific behavior.

Static and Dynamic Color

The compact bottom row contains two unlabeled radio buttons:

  • The first radio button selects Static Color and uses the adjacent color rectangle. Click the rectangle to open Illustrator's native, document-aware color picker.
  • The second radio button selects Dynamic Color and samples color from the source artwork. Its adjacent rectangle contains the flower icon.

The two color choices share one compact row.

Circular and Spiral Centers

When Circular or Spiral is active, a target button appears to the right of the Dynamic Color selector. Click it to enter Pick fill center mode, then click a point in the document to place the center. The point can be outside the source bounds, which is useful for off-axis rings and spirals.

The picker ends immediately after a center is placed. Press Esc or click the target button again to cancel it. Double-click the target button to return the center to the middle of the source. The chosen center is stored with the Live Effect.

See Color & Appearance.

Automatic Updates

Fill, color-mode, and typed-value changes update the selected effect automatically. Slider movement previews continuously while dragging and commits the final value when released. To apply Linestra to ordinary selected artwork, click a fill button or use Illustrator's Effect menu. No separate Apply or Update button is required.

Panel Menu and Updates

Open the panel menu in its upper-right corner for four commands:

  • Settings… sets the upper limits used by the Thickness and Spacing/Interval controls.
  • Check for Updates… opens the Linestra updater and checks for a newer installed release.
  • About Vexy Linestra… shows the installed version, build number, and product links.
  • Check out Vexy Lines… opens the Vexy Lines product page in your browser.

The panel has a fixed, compact size, so it does not need a resize handle.

Appearance Panel Integration

Applied effects appear in Illustrator's Appearance panel as Vexy Linestra Linear, Vexy Linestra Wave, and similar names. Double-click the effect row to bring forward the panel with that effect's stored parameters.

Light and Dark Themes

The panel reads Illustrator's panel background through the plug-in API. Labels and inactive icons switch between dark and light artwork for contrast, while the active fill keeps Illustrator's accent color.

For the complete workflow, continue to Live Effect Workflow.