FindReplace Art Preferences

The preferences dialog is accessible through the flyout menu on the FindReplace Art panel.

1. Search History Size

The number of completed art searches to save in the history list, which can be stepped through forwards and backwards with the navigation arrows in the top line of the panel. Search History Size can be set from 1 to 999.

2. Maintain Search History Across Sessions

When enabled, the art search history list will be maintained across Illustrator sessions instead of being cleared each time Illustrator is launched.

3. Selection Changes Are Undoable

When enabled, selecting matching art, adding matching art to the selection, and removing matching art from the selection will be undoable operations.

4. Ignore Guides for Art Kind ‘Any’

When enabled, unlocked guides will not be matched when searching with the art kind set to Any. Searching specifically for art kind Guide is still possible.

5. Ignore Groups When Replacing Art Kind ‘Any’

When enabled, groups will be ignored when the search is set to art kind Any. This allows replacing art of multiple kinds that is grouped without having those members immediately lost when the entire group itself is replaced.

6. Use Clipping Paths For Art Bounds

When enabled, clipping sets will use only their clipping paths to determine their bounds. This affects their Linear Extent attribute value, as well as replacement positioning when it is set to Bounding Box Center.

7. Close Color Tolerance

The tolerance (from 1 to 100) that determines whether one color is considered “close” to another; higher values mean more colors are considered close.

FindReplace Art Close Color Tolerance Example

FindReplace Art Close Color Tolerance Example

8. Eyedropper Clearance

When picking up numerical values by clicking on the eyedropper icons, pressing the Option/Alt key while clicking will automatically adjust their min and max values by the indicated amount. This can be useful because sometimes values which appear the same in an Illustrator panel (due to the value being rounded) are not actually stored as exactly the same value internally. For example, one object’s opacity may be displayed as 75% and be stored internally as 0.7500000001, whereas another object from a different source, perhaps, may also be displayed as 75% but be stored as 0.7499999998, and won’t be matched without a small amount of “slop”.

9. Center View When Locating Matching Art

When enabled, clicking the Locate button will automatically shift the artboard so that the highlighted, matching art is centered within the document window.

10. Highlighting Color

The color with which to highlight located matching art, from among Magenta, Green, Cyan, Red, or Yellow.

11. Informational area

Shows a brief description of each preference control when the cursor is being hovered over it.