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I have a relatively complicated repeating vector inside of a clipping mask.

There's a lot of parts that are not seen but take up a lot of disk space.

I was curious if there was a way to flatten/crop/remove anything outside of the clipping mask but still retain it as a vector image.

Is that possible? If so how can I accomplish that?

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4 Answers 4

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You could make a box/shape that is a clone of the clipping mask. Select that object and all the paths you want to clip. Then use the Pathfinder crop tool to remove everything outside the path...

Pathfinder tool palette

Here is an example result...

enter image description here

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  • how do i remove the rectangle and keep just the inside shape?
    – pvinis
    Apr 24, 2015 at 14:52
  • Those are separate objects, so select a corner of the rectangle with the hollow arrow tool and hit delete twice. In the example, you would have to do this for the upper and lower remnants of the rectangle separately.
    – beroe
    Apr 26, 2015 at 15:59
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    I use the pathfinder tool all the time but for some reason I've almost completely ignored the crop option until now. This really made this very easy to "flatten" a group of clipped objects.
    – samnau
    Dec 16, 2022 at 15:49
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Huh. The answer is stunningly simple, and stunningly non-obvious. So non-obvious that I discovered it completely by accident while trying to follow instructions on more complicated ways to do this that involve releasing the clipping group, and then cropping.

Click on the <Clip Group> object to select it. Select no other objects. Then in the pathfinder window, click on the crop button. This produce a regular <Group> (no longer a clipping group) with all the vectors objects inside the old clipping group clipped to the old <Clip Outline>. Essentially exactly what you would expect if you were to flatten the clip group (were such a thing possible). Probably doesn't work so well for images.

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  • This does not always work. I have several grups inside the clipping grup, maybe this is part of the issue.
    – James
    Sep 7, 2023 at 11:55
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I had a similar question—using Illustrator CC 2021—but the Pathfinder crop solution, noted above, left me with just a portion of my clipping mask as a new object. I had only selected the Clipping Group as instructed in that post.

For me, it was just as simple, but I utilized the Pathfinder tool divide instead. This gave me the path that was exactly what I wanted; I just had to re-fill a few shapes for it to appear exactly the same.

I'm guessing this is because my Clipping Group had a nested Clipping Group, both were created by pasting shapes into objects using Draw Inside mode.

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I notice that the provided answers do not work very well with my use case: a group of lines without fills. (CAD-like drawings, for example.)

As a work-around, you might try repeated use of the eraser tool.screenshot of the erases tool

By pressing 'SHIFT' before you start dragging the tool, you will force it to be a thin horizontal or vertical line. After dragging 4 lines this way, you will have cut out a rectangle. You can now manually erase the artwork outside of it.

The erases tool does not snap to existing anchor points in the artwork, so it's not as precise as the crop tool.

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